Gravitational waves from spinning eccentric binaries**This paper is dedicated to the memory of our colleague and friend Péter Csizmadia a young physicist, computer expert and one of the best Hungarian mountaineers who disappeared in China’s Sichuan near the Ren Zhong Feng peak of the Himalayas on 23 Oct. 2009. We started to develop CBwaves jointly with Péter a couple of

Abstract

This paper is to introduce a new software called CBwaves which provides a fast and accurate computational tool to determine the gravitational waveforms yielded by generic spinning binaries of neutron stars and/or black holes on eccentric orbits. This is done within the post-Newtonian (PN) framework by integrating the equations of motion and the spin precession equations, while the radiation field is determined by a simultaneous evaluation of the analytic waveforms. In applying CBwaves various physically interesting scenarios have been investigated. In particular, we have studied the appropriateness of the adiabatic approximation, and justified that the energy balance relation is indeed insensitive to the specific form of the applied radiation reaction term. By studying eccentric binary systems, it is demonstrated that circular template banks are very ineffective in identifying binaries even if they possess tiny residual orbital eccentricity, thus confirming a similar result obtained by Brown and Zimmerman (2010 Phys. Rev. D 81 024007). In addition, by investigating the validity of the energy balance relation we show that, contrary to the general expectations, the PN approximation should not be applied once the PN parameter gets beyond the critical value ∼0.08 − 0.1. Finally, by studying the early phase of the gravitational waves emitted by strongly eccentric binary systems—which could be formed e.g. in various many-body interactions in the galactic halo—we have found that they possess very specific characteristics which may be used to identify these type of binary systems.