Eccentricity week in Corfu
Published:
I spent the first week of September in Corfu for the workshop Binary compact objects on eccentric orbits and their gravitational-wave signatures, held at the Corfu Summer Institute.
On the first morning I joined Teagan Clarke, Gonzalo Morras and Sasha Husa on the opening panel, Detecting eccentricity: current evidence and future prospects. We talked about where the current hints of eccentricity in LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA events stand, and what it will take to turn them into confident detections.
It was great to see so much interest in eccentric binaries: the workshop brought together close to ninety people working on theory, numerical relativity, waveform modeling, data analysis and astrophysics.
During the workshop week we submitted our latest paper on SEOBNRv6EPHM, the first generic-orbit, spin-precessing model in the SEOBNR family. It follows up on SEOBNRv6EHM by adding spin precession, and allows eccentric and precessing effects to be analyzed together at a cost comparable to current quasi-circular analyses. Read the preprint: arXiv:2609.01568.
Many thanks to the organizers, Isobel Romero-Shaw, Rossella Gamba, Davide Gerosa and Michalis Agathos, for a very well-run and friendly week. Talking about eccentric orbits between swims at Corfu’s beaches was hard to beat!