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Astrophysics, High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena, astro-ph.HE
Abstract:
When formed through dynamical interactions, stellar-mass binary black holes
may retain eccentric orbits ($e>0.1$ at 10 Hz) detectable by ground-based
gravitational-wave detectors. Eccentricity can therefore be used to
differentiate dynamically-formed binaries from isolated binary black hole
mergers. Current template-based gravitational-wave searches do not use waveform
models associated to eccentric orbits, rendering the search less efficient to
eccentric binary systems. Here we present results of a search for binary black
hole mergers that inspiral in eccentric orbits using data from the first and
second observing runs (O1 and O2) of Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo. The
search uses minimal assumptions on the morphology of the transient
gravitational waveform. We show that it is sensitive to binary mergers with a
detection range that is weakly dependent on eccentricity for all bound systems.
Our search did not identify any new binary merger candidates. We interpret
these results in light of eccentric binary formation models.
