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Updated: May 27, 2026

Magnetically Induced Rotating Rayleigh-Taylor Instability
Published on: March 3, 2017
Imprint of accretion disk-induced migration on gravitational waves from extreme mass ratio inspirals
Nicolás Yunes1, Bence Kocsis, Abraham Loeb
1Department of Physics and MIT Kavli Institute, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA.
Abstract:
We study the effects of a thin gaseous accretion disk on the inspiral of a stellar-mass black hole into a supermassive black hole. We construct a phenomenological angular momentum transport equation that reproduces known disk effects. Disk torques modify the gravitational wave phase evolution to detectable levels with LISA for reasonable disk parameters. The Fourier transform of disk-modified waveforms acquires a correction with a different frequency trend than post-Newtonian vacuum terms. Such inspirals could be used to detect accretion disks with LISA and to probe their physical parameters.
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