Dr. Nicholas Loutrel, Milan-Bicocca

Title:  The Eccentric Behavior of Compact Binaries

The exceptional efforts of the LVK collaboration have resulted in the unprecedented detection of gravitational waves from ninety compact object binaries, most of which are binary black holes. Recent reanalysis of the current catalog has revealed that some of the sources may be consistent with binaries possessing small orbital eccentricity, while one is speculated to be formed from a highly eccentric merger. Such results have led to a renewed interest in the effect of orbital eccentricity on gravitational waves emitted by binary systems, and what can be inferred from its presence. In this talk, I will present a broad overview of gravitational wave generation and the effect orbital eccentricity has on this, the current state of our eccentric waveform models and where improvement need to be made, and why eccentricity is important for extracting fundamental physics and astrophysics from gravitational waves.