Disks, spikes, and clouds: distinguishing environmental effects on BBH gravitational waveforms

Future gravitational wave interferometers such as LISA, Taiji, DECIGO, and TianQin, will enable precision studies of the environment surrounding black holes. In this paper, we study intermediate and extreme mass ratio binary black hole inspirals, and consider three possible environments surrounding...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2022-11
Main Authors: Cole, Philippa S, Bertone, Gianfranco, Coogan, Adam, Gaggero, Daniele, Karydas, Theophanes, Kavanagh, Bradley J, Spieksma, Thomas F M, Tomaselli, Giovanni Maria
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Accretion disks
Bayesian analysis
Black holes
Dark matter
Environmental effects
Gravitational effects
Gravitational waves
Scalars
Waveforms
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Summary:Future gravitational wave interferometers such as LISA, Taiji, DECIGO, and TianQin, will enable precision studies of the environment surrounding black holes. In this paper, we study intermediate and extreme mass ratio binary black hole inspirals, and consider three possible environments surrounding the primary black hole: accretion disks, dark matter spikes, and clouds of ultra-light scalar fields, also known as gravitational atoms. We present a Bayesian analysis of the detectability and measurability of these three environments. Focusing for concreteness on the case of a detection with LISA, we show that the characteristic imprint they leave on the gravitational waveform would allow us to identify the environment that generated the signal, and to accurately reconstruct its model parameters.
ISSN:2331-8422