Efficient Gravitational-Wave Model for Fully-Precessing and Moderately-Eccentric, Compact Binary Inspirals

Future gravitational-wave detectors, especially the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), will be sensitive to black hole binaries formed in astrophysical environments that promote large eccentricities and spin precession. Gravitational-wave templates that include both effects have only recently begun to be developed. The Efficient Fully Precessing Eccentric (EFPE) family is one such model, covering the inspiral stage with small-eccentricity-expanded gravitational-wave amplitudes accurate for eccentricities e < 0.3. In this work, we extend this model to cover a larger range of eccentricities. The new EFPE_ME model is able to accurately represent the leading-order gravitational-wave amplitudes to e ≤ 0.8. Comparing the EFPE and the EFPE_ME models in the LISA band, however, reveals that there is no significant difference when e_0 ≤ 0.5 for binaries at 4 years before merger, as radiation reaction circularizes supermassive black hole binaries too quickly. This suggests that the EFPE model may have a larger regime of validity in eccentricity space than previously thought, making it suitable for some inspiral parameter estimation with LISA data. On the other hand, for systems with e_0 > 0.5, the deviations between the models are significant, particularly for binaries with total masses below 10^5 M_⊙. This suggests that the EFPE_ME model will be crucial to avoid systematic bias in parameter estimation with LISA in the future, once this model has been hybridized to include the merger and ringdown.