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Eccentric and unbound compact binaries in the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA catalog: Parameter estimation and waveform systematics with seobnrv6ehm

Lorenzo Pompili1,2,*, Aldo Gamboa2,†, and Alessandra Buonanno2,3,‡

  • *Contact author: lorenzo.pompili@nottingham.ac.uk
  • †Contact author: aldo.gamboa@aei.mpg.de
  • ‡Contact author: alessandra.buonanno@aei.mpg.de
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Phys. Rev. D 114, 104009 – Published 3 November, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/cx64-gmkk

Abstract

Orbital eccentricity encodes key information about compact binary formation channels and astrophysical environments, making it a critical target for gravitational-wave (GW) inference. We present parameter estimation (PE) analyses of GWs from eccentric compact binaries with the seobnrv6ehm waveform model. Using long, highly eccentric numerical relativity waveforms as synthetic signals, we compare parameter recovery across state-of-the-art eccentric models. We find that seobnrv5ehm and teobresums-dalí can yield biased estimates of eccentricity, masses, and spins in the most challenging configurations, while seobnrv6ehm significantly reduces these biases. Applying seobnrv6ehm to 27 GW events from the O1–O4 LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA observing runs—including binary black hole, neutron star–black hole, and binary neutron star mergers—we identify five events with mild support for eccentricity over the quasicircular precessing-spin hypothesis, with Bayes factors log10BQCPEAS>0.5. Since seobnrv6ehm is applicable to generic planar binaries, we reanalyze five high-mass events allowing for unbound initial conditions. For three of them—including GW190521, previously claimed to originate from a dynamical capture—a direct-capture configuration is comparable to, or marginally favored over, both the eccentric aligned-spin and quasicircular precessing-spin hypotheses (log10BQCPunbound≈0.2–0.6 for GW190521). The recovered configurations are, however, astrophysically unrealistic and cannot be confidently discriminated from highly eccentric bound orbits, so these results do not, by themselves, support an unbound origin for these events. seobnrv6ehm is three to five times faster in PE analyses than seobnrv5ehm, while improving waveform accuracy, enabling efficient, large-scale GW inference with eccentric waveforms.

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Accurate waveforms for generic planar-orbit binary black holes: The multipolar effective-one-body model SEOBNRv6EHM

Aldo Gamboa, Alessandra Buonanno, Lorenzo Pompili, Raffi Enficiaud, Michael Boyle, Lawrence E. Kidder, Oliver Long, Peter James Nee, Harald P. Pfeiffer, Antoni Ramos-Buades, and Mark A. Scheel
Phys. Rev. D 114, 104010 (2026)

Article Text

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Phys. Rev. D 114, 104009– Published 3 November, 2026
  • Received 9 June 2026
  • Accepted 30 September 2026
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