Gravitational Wave Peeps from EMRIs and their Implication for LISA Signal Confusion Noise

• Main Authors: Oliver, Daniel J, Johnson, Aaron D, Berrier, Joel, Glampedakis, Kostas, Kennefick, Daniel
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 09.05.2023
• Subjects: Physics - Astrophysics of Galaxies; Physics - General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2305.05793

Scattering events around a supermassive black hole will occasionally toss a stellar-mass compact object into an orbit around the supermassive black hole, beginning an extreme mass ratio inspiral. The early stages of such a highly eccentric orbit will not produce detectable gravitational waves as the source will only be in a suitable frequency band briefly when it is close to periapsis during each long-period orbit. This burst of emission, firmly in the millihertz band is the gravitational wave peep. While a single peep is not likely to be detectable, if we consider an ensemble of such subthreshold sources, spread across the universe, together they produce an unresolvable background noise that may obscure sources otherwise detectable by the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, the proposed space-based gravitational wave detector. Previous studies of the extreme mass ratio burst signal confusion background focused more on parabolic orbits going very near the supermassive black hole and on events near the galactic center. We seek to improve this characterization by implementing numerical kludge waveforms that can calculate highly eccentric orbits with relativistic effects focusing on orbits which are farther away from the supermassive black hole and thus less likely to be detectable on their own, but will otherwise contribute to the background signal confusion noise. Here we present the waveforms and spectra of the gravitational wave peeps generated from recent calculations of extreme mass ratio inspirals/bursts capture parameters and discuss how these can be used to estimate the signal confusion noise generated by such events.