Eccentricity-Modulated Phase Degeneracy and Distinguishability between Dark Matter and Accretion Disk Environmental Effects in EMRIs
Abstract
Extreme mass-ratio inspirals (EMRIs) are sensitive probes of weak environmental effects around massive black holes, since such effects can accumulate into observable gravitational-wave phase shifts. In this work, we study the phase degeneracy between dark matter halos and accretion disks in eccentric EMRI waveforms. We model the dark matter (DM) environment with NFW and Beta halo profiles, and describe the disk using a thin α-disk model. Their distinguishability is quantified through eccentricity-dependent phase diagnostics and the residual signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in the LISA band. Our results show that DM-induced dephasing depends only weakly on the initial eccentricity e0, whereas disk-induced dephasing is strongly suppressed as e0 increases. The distinguishability time exhibits a smooth and weakly non-monotonic dependence on the initial eccentricity, while being more strongly controlled by the environmental strength. For the benchmark systems considered here, the DM--disk waveform difference can be detectable by LISA, and e0 can serve as an auxiliary diagnostic in addition to the observation duration.
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BibTeX
@misc{wu2026eccentricitymodulated,
title = {{Eccentricity-Modulated Phase Degeneracy and Distinguishability between Dark Matter and Accretion Disk Environmental Effects in EMRIs}},
author = {Tian-Hao Wu and Shu-Jun Rong},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2607.09214},
eprint = {2607.09214},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.09214},
note = {CC BY-NC-ND 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Eccentricity-Modulated Phase Degeneracy and Distinguishability between Dark Matter and Accretion Disk Environmental Effects in EMRIs
AU - Tian-Hao Wu
AU - Shu-Jun Rong
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/28
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2607.09214
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.09214
AB - Extreme mass-ratio inspirals (EMRIs) are sensitive probes of weak environmental effects around massive black holes, since such effects can accumulate into observable gravitational-wave phase shifts. In this work, we study the phase degeneracy between dark matter halos and accretion disks in eccentric EMRI waveforms. We model the dark matter (DM) environment with NFW and Beta halo profiles, and describe the disk using a thin α-disk model. Their distinguishability is quantified through eccentricity-dependent phase diagnostics and the residual signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in the LISA band. Our results show that DM-induced dephasing depends only weakly on the initial eccentricity e_0, whereas disk-induced dephasing is strongly suppressed as e_0 increases. The distinguishability time exhibits a smooth and weakly non-monotonic dependence on the initial eccentricity, while being more strongly controlled by the environmental strength. For the benchmark systems considered here, the DM--disk waveform difference can be detectable by LISA, and e_0 can serve as an auxiliary diagnostic in addition to the observation duration.
ER -