Toward an analytic model for eccentric waveforms

The emission of gravitational waves causes the eccentricity of binaries to decay, but there are astrophysical scenarios that suggest that some number of binaries may have non-negligible eccentricities when entering the LIGO sensitivity band. This suggests that accurate and efficient waveform models for eccentric binaries may be needed once gravitational wave detectors reach design sensitivity. I will begin by presenting the number of harmonics needed to detect an eccentric signal and to do parameter estimation faithfully. I will then discuss the stationary phase approximation to represent the frequency domain signal. Lastly, we make use of the approximated signal to conduct Markov Chain Monte Carlo parameter estimation studies.