Leor Barack

LISA capture sources: approximate waveforms, signal-to-noise ratios, and parameter estimation accuracy

Captures of stellar-mass compact objects (COs) by massive (

Event rate estimates for LISA extreme mass ratio capture sources

\sim 10^6 M_\odot

Mode sum regularization approach for the self-force in black hole spacetime

) black holes (MBHs) are potentially an important source for LISA, the proposed space-based gravitational-wave (GW) detector. The orbits of the inspiraling COs are highly complicated; they can remain rather eccentric up until the final plunge, and display extreme versions of relativistic perihelion precession and Lense-Thirring precession of the orbital plane. The strongest capture signals will be ~10 times weaker than LISAs instrumental noise, but in principle (with sufficient computing power) they can be disentangled from the noise by matched filtering. The associated template waveforms are not yet in hand, but theorists will very likely be able to provide them before LISA launches. Here we introduce a family of approximate (post-Newtonian) capture waveforms, given in (nearly) analytic form, for use in advancing LISA studies until more accurate versions are available. Our model waveforms include most of the key qualitative features of true waveforms, and cover the full space of capture-event parameters (including orbital eccentricity and the MBHs spin). Here we use our approximate waveforms to (i) estimate the relative contributions of different harmonics (of the orbital frequency) to the total signal-to-noise ratio, and (ii) estimate the accuracy with which LISA will be able to extract the physical parameters of the capture event from the measured waveform. For a typical source (a

Using LISA extreme-mass-ratio inspiral sources to test off-Kerr deviations in the geometry of massive black holes

10 M_\odot

Gravitational self-force on a particle in eccentric orbit around a Schwarzschild black hole

CO captured by a

Gravitational self-force correction to the innermost stable circular orbit of a Schwarzschild black hole

10^6 M_\odot

Late time decay of scalar perturbations outside rotating black holes

MBH at a signal-to-noise ratio of 30), we find that LISA can determine the MBH and CO masses to within a fractional error of

Gravitational Self-Force on a Particle Orbiting a Kerr Black Hole

\sim 10^{-4}

Gravitational self-force and the effective-one-body formalism between the innermost stable circular orbit and the light ring

, measure

Two approaches for the gravitational self force in black hole spacetime: Comparison of numerical results

S/M^2