An Efficient Implementation of the Chimera: Approximate Waveforms for Extreme-Mass-Ratio Inspirals

The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) will detect extreme mass-ratio inspirals (EMRIs): binary systems where a small compact object (SCO) orbits a supermassive black hole (MBH). The compactness of the SCO locally perturbs the MBH's background geometry, which in turn perturbs the SCO's motion. This gravitational self-interaction causes the SCO to radiate energy and slowly inspiral into the MBH. Due to their significant mass disparity, these systems offer unique opportunities to probe black hole properties and test general relativity in the "strong-field" regime. In this talk, I will present the first library of EMRI waveforms based on the Chimera: a kludge-scheme which approximates the self-force locally by blending ingredients from black hole perturbation theory, multipolar post-Minkowskian formalism, and post-Newtonian theory, proposed by Sopuerta and Yunes more than a decade ago. After a systematic comparison of these waveforms to augmented analytic kludge (AAK) and Teukolsky-based ones, we argue that these Chimera-based waveforms are also well-suited for data analysis and parameter estimation for EMRIs.