Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Date of Award

1-1-2023

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

M.S. in Physics

First Advisor

Leo C. Stein

Second Advisor

Jake V. Bennett

Third Advisor

Anuradha Gupta

School

University of Mississippi

Relational Format

dissertation/thesis

Abstract

The future space-based gravitational wave observatory LISA is expected to capture signals from extreme mass ratio inspirals (EMRIs), a new class of inspiral systems which current detectors are not sensitive to. Detection and characterization of EMRI systems requires long and accurate waveform models, which may require accounting for effects like those seen in the presence of an external tidal field. In particular, such a perturbation may break integrability of the system and cause significant dephasing. In this thesis, we use a Newtonian analogue of a Kerr black hole to study the effect of an external tidal field when the system is at resonance. In this endeavor, we have developed a numerical framework which uses a symplectic splitting algorithm to take advantage of the integrability of the system. We used the resulting dynamical information to construct kludge gravitational waveforms and estimate the timescale over which the perturbation affects the dynamics. By comparing this timescale to the estimated characteristic time due to radiation reaction at resonance, we introduce a tool for quantifying the region of phase space which requires tidal effect modeling for EMRI waveform generation. In this thesis, we study the particular case of a 2:3 radial to polar frequency resonance in the Newtonian analogue model, where we find a heuristic bound, ε ≳ 70 q, for this region of parameter space, where ε measures the strength of the external tidal field and q is the mass ratio.

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