Parameter estimation of eccentric inspiraling compact binaries using an enhanced post circular model for ground-based detectors

© 2015 American Physical Society. Inspiraling compact binaries have been identified as one of the most promising sources for gravitational-wave detection. These binaries are always expected to have been circularized by the gravitational radiation when they enter the detector's frequency band. However, recent studies indicate that some binaries may still possess a significant eccentricity. In light of the enhanced post-circular waveform model for eccentric binaries in the frequency domain, we do a systematic study of the possible signal-to-noise ratio loss if one uses quasicircular waveform templates to analyze the eccentric signal, and revisit the problem of parameter estimation of gravitational-wave chirp signals from eccentric compact binaries. We confirm previous results from other researchers that the resulting signal-to-noise ratio loss becomes larger than 5% for eccentricity bigger than 0.1 and the resulting parameter estimation bias is more than 0.1%. We study the parameter estimation accuracy for such a waveform with different initial eccentricities from 0.1 to 0.4 by using the Fisher matrix method. As expected, the eccentricity improves the parameter estimation accuracy significantly by breaking degeneracies between different parameters. Particularly, we find that the eccentricity errors improve by 2 orders of magnitude from 10-2 to 10-4 when eccentricity grows from 0.1 to 0.4, and the estimated errors of the chirp mass are about 10-3 for a binary black hole using the Advanced LIGO detector. For the Einstein Telescope detector, the estimated accuracy of parameters will be 2 orders of magnitude higher.