Search for Eccentric Neutron Star-Black Hole Binaries in Advanced LIGO's Fourth Observing Run using Effective-One-Body Waveforms

Abstract

The observation of orbital eccentricity in compact binary coalescences would provide a direct signature of dynamical formation environments. Previous matched-filter searches for eccentric neutron star-black hole (NSBH) binaries have been severely limited by computational constraints, necessitating the use of simplified waveform models that capture secular dephasing but omit apsidal precession and inter-orbit harmonics. Including these physical features increases the sensitive search volume for systems with $0.2\le e_{20}\le 0.28$ by $\sim 25\%$ to $30\%$. We present a rapid matched-filter search methodology that makes the direct use of time-domain effective-one-body waveforms computationally feasible. By multibanding and high-frequency ratio-filtering, our pipeline achieves a $\sim 20\times$ reduction in computational cost. This allows a bank of 88.6 million effective-one-body templates, fifteen times larger than prior eccentric analyses, to search O4a and O4b Advanced LIGO data. We recover the known low-mass mergers GW230518_125908 and GW230529_181500 with parameters consistent with zero eccentricity. Finding no new gravitational-wave events with orbital eccentricity ($e_{20}\ge 0.05$), we place $90\%$ credible upper limits on the local merger rate density of eccentric NSBH systems across the search space of ${\mathcal{R}}_{90\%}\le 7.5\text{-}57{\mathrm{Gpc}}^{-3}{\mathrm{yr}}^{-1}$, up to a factor of $\sim 4$ improvement over previous observational bounds. At the parameters of GW200105_162426, this non-detection establishes an upper limit of ${\mathcal{R}}_{90\%}\le 12.1{\mathrm{Gpc}}^{-3}{\mathrm{yr}}^{-1}$. Alternatively, if GW200105_162426 is treated as an eccentric detection, the lack of subsequent detections in O4 updates the inferred local merger rate density of this population to $\mathcal{R}=6.6_{-3.8}^{+6.3}{\mathrm{Gpc}}^{-3}{\mathrm{yr}}^{-1}$.

arXiv comment20 pages, 16 figures, 1 table