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An Enhanced Formation Channel for Galactic Dual-line Gravitational-wave Sources: von Zeipel–Lidov–Kozai Effect in Triples Involving Sgr A*

  • Authors: Wen-Fan Feng, Tan Liu, Yun Fang, Yacheng Kang, Bin Liu, Lijing Shao

Wen-Fan Feng et al 2026 The Astrophysical Journal Letters 1003 .

  • Provider: AAS Journals

Caption: Figure 3.

Dual-line gravitational radiation excitation through the ZLK effect for the Galactic Center NS–NS systems. Left panel: green contours show LISA-detectable systems without the ZLK effect, bounded by ρNS-NS = 5 (right) and ρNS-NS = 40 (left) in the ai–(1 − ei) parameter space. The light blue region indicates ZLK dominance, exemplified by a system with ei0 = 0.6 and Pi = 7 h. The magenta point represents a rapidly spinning NS component detectable by Cosmic Explorer (Figure 2). Without ZLK, this system has ρNS-NS = 0.16 (undetectable), but ZLK-driven eccentricity oscillations boost the SNR to 5.5 over 4 yr. The dark green contour shows the ZLK-modified SNR threshold ρZLK = 5, which extends into regions of larger orbital separation and lower eccentricity than the standard detection boundary. Right panel: Monte Carlo sampling of inner binary orbital elements, followed by ZLK-induced secular evolution calculations, indicates that this parameter-space expansion increases the number of detectable sources by ∼5-fold (or nearly an order of magnitude for the uniform eccentricity distribution; see Figure 4 in Appendix B). ZLK oscillations therefore promote wide binaries from unresolvable backgrounds into LISA’s detection window, substantially improving dual-line prospects and establishing the ZLK effect as a viable formation channel for Galactic Center dual-line systems.

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