In all the papers I’ve been first author on, I’ve gone with no hyphens. But I have also co-authored papers with “extreme mass-ratio inspiral” and “extreme-mass-ratio inspiral”, so it depends how much you personally like hyphens

In short: so long as we're careful, fast EMRI waveforms can be accurate enough for LISA’s science goals including pushing general relativity to its limits

The good news is if interpolation errors are controlled so that they’re no bigger than the small mass ratio (say 1 part in 100,000), they won’t hurt parameter estimation.

We found that:
1️⃣ For rapidly spinning black holes, you need to include at least ~30 modes to avoid bias.
2️⃣ A smart interpolation method using Chebyshev polynomials can be more efficient, reaching the needed accuracy with far fewer data points, while still being fast enough

Our new study looks at hidden systematic errors that can crop up when calculating the flux. We focused on two culprits:
1️⃣ Cutting off the calculation of higher modes
2️⃣ Errors introduced when using interpolating the flux to create fast waveform models

We focus on leading order (adiabatic) waveform models where one only needs to balance the flux of energy leaving the system in the form of gravitational waves with the orbital energy lost by smaller black hole

But there’s a challenge: to decode these signals, we need waveform models that are both super accurate (tiny phase errors matter!) and super fast (millions of templates are needed to search data).

EMRIs can orbit hundreds of thousands of times before merging. Their gravitational waves carry a detailed map of spacetime near supermassive black holes, providing a unique test of Einstein’s theory in the strongest gravity we can observe.

Future space missions like LISA will listen to gravitational waves from some of the most extreme events in the universe: Extreme Mass-Ratio Inspirals (EMRIs). These are systems where a stellar mass black hole spirals into a supermassive one while emitting low frequency graviational waves