Detectability of Binary Black Hole Hyperbolic Encounters in Gravitational-Wave Detectors

Binary black hole (BBH) Hyperbolic Encounters involve two black holes in a fly-by orbit, with emission of gravitational-wave (GW) bremsstrahlung. BBH hyperbolic encounters may be prevalent in dense stellar clusters, where collision rates are high. These encounters can be modeled by a small number of parameters: the relative velocity, total mass, and the impact parameter, a geometric property of the orbit. The corresponding GW signal would manifest in ground-based interferometers as a single-cycle transient. We present a study to constrain detection rates for current and next generation ground-based GW detectors. We use waveforms from numerical simulations which cover a discrete grid of mass ratios ranging from q=1 (equal mass) to asymmetric mass ratio q = 16. We use BayesWave, a model-agnostic algorithm which characterizes features in the data regardless of an a priori assumed model. For this analysis, we have used shapelets, Morlet-Gabor and chirplets to reconstruct the injections, and compared their effectiveness.