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Welcome to the Eccentricity wiki!

The overall goal is to come up with a definition of eccentricity that can be used for NR, waveform models, parameter estimation, and astro applications. This repo is for collecting useful scripts and knowledge.

The first meeting is at 4 pm Berlin time on Thu, Mar 24. Beware of Daylight savings, and use this calendar link.

Goals for the definition of eccentricity

Short term goals

• Standardize the definition of eccentricity and mean anomaly, at least for aligned-spin eccentric BBHs.
• Should be defined using the waveform.
• Should be suitable for NR, waveform models, PE, and Astro applications. Should be applicable to as large a subset of existing waveforms/NR codes as possible.
• Should approach Newtonian eccentricity in the suitable limit
• Should be a smooth function of the internal ecc/meanano definitions of NR/WF models.
• Come up with a Python implementation that can be easily used in postprocessing.
• Should be robust (i.e. work with very low failure rate)

Long term goals

• Should work for small and large eccentricities.
• Should generalize to precessing eccentric binaries.
• Would be nice if it smoothly connects bound -> unbound cases (for dynamic capture)
• Have techniques that allow SXS BBH simulations to dial into specific standard-ecc/meanano as part of eccentricity tuning.