Post-Newtonian theory-inspired framework for characterizing eccentricity in gravitational waveforms

Characterizing eccentricity in gravitational waveforms in a consistent manner is crucial to facilitate parameter estimation, astrophysical population studies, as well as searches for these rare systems. We present a framework to characterize eccentricity directly from gravitational waveforms for nonprecessing eccentric binary black hole mergers using common modulations that eccentricity induces in all spherical harmonic modes of the signals. Our framework is in the spirit of existing methods that use frequency modulations in the waveforms, but we refine the approach by connecting it with state-of-the-art post-Newtonian calculations of the time evolution of the eccentricity. Using 39 numerical relativity (NR) simulations from the SXS and RIT catalogs, as well as waveforms obtained from the post-Newtonian approximation and effective-one-body formalism, we show that our framework provides eccentricity estimates that connect smoothly into the relativistic regime (even up to  ∼2⁢𝑀 before merger). We also find that it is necessary to carry existing post-Newtonian calculations to an extra 0.5 post-Newtonian order to adequately characterize existing NR simulations, and provide fits to the extra coefficient for existing simulations. We make the framework publicly available through the python-based gwmodels package.