Kavli Affiliate: Scott A. Hughes
| First 5 Authors: Sayak Datta, Richard Brito, Scott A. Hughes, Talya Klinger, Paolo Pani
| Summary:
Tidal heating in a binary black hole system is driven by the absorption of
energy and angular momentum by the black hole’s horizon. Previous works have
shown that this phenomenon becomes particularly significant during the late
stages of an extreme mass ratio inspiral (EMRI) into a rapidly spinning massive
black hole, a key focus for future low-frequency gravitational-wave
observations by (for instance) the LISA mission. Past analyses have largely
focused on quasi-circular inspiral geometry, with some of the most detailed
studies looking at equatorial cases. Though useful for illustrating the
physical principles, this limit is not very realistic astrophysically, since
the population of EMRI events is expected to arise from compact objects
scattered onto relativistic orbits in galactic centers through many-body
events. In this work, we extend those results by studying the importance of
tidal heating in equatorial EMRIs with generic eccentricities. Our results
suggest that accurate modeling of tidal heating is crucial to prevent
significant dephasing and systematic errors in EMRI parameter estimation. We
examine a phenomenological model for EMRIs around exotic compact objects by
parameterizing deviations from the black hole picture in terms of the fraction
of radiation absorbed compared to the BH case. Based on a mismatch calculation
we find that reflectivities as small as $|mathcal{R}|^2 sim
mathcal{O}(10^{-5})$ are distinguishable from the BH case, irrespective of the
value of the eccentricity. We stress, however, that this finding should be
corroborated by future parameter estimation studies.
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