Detection of Intermediate-mass Ratio Inspirals in Globular Clusters: Revealing the Brownian Motion with Gravitational Waves

Abstract Intermediate-mass ratio inspirals (IMRIs) formed by stellar-mass compact objects orbiting intermediate-mass black holes will be detected by future gravitational wave (GW) observatories like TianQin, LISA, and AION. We study a set of 100 IMRI systems in globular clusters obtained from MOCCA simulations to estimate their detectability. Furthermore, we model the Brownian motion of the IMRIs induced by weak interactions with the surrounding field of stars and include its effect on the GW’s phase through Doppler and aberrational phase shift. We find that a small fraction of IMRIs (<10%) will have signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) high enough to be detected by TianQin, LISA, and AION. However, for all sources detected, the SNR is high enough to discern the Brownian motion of the IMRI. More precisely, we find that the match between the signal containing the effect of the Brownian motion and a waveform model without this effect is mostly low (<0.8). These results highlight the importance of including the interaction of IMRIs with the surrounding field of stars to obtain proper detection, but also show the possibility of studying the environment of the source using GWs.