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We determine the ability of Cosmic Explorer, a proposed third-generation gravitational-wave observatory, to detect eccentric binary neutron stars and to measure their eccentricity. We find that for a matched-filter search, template banks constructed using binaries in quasicircular orbits are effectual for eccentric neutron star binaries with e<0.004 (e<0.003)is the binary’s eccentricity at a gravitational-wave frequency of 7 Hz. We show that stochastic template placement can be used to construct a matched-filter search for binaries with larger eccentricities and construct an effectual template bank for binaries with e<0.05. We show that the computational cost of both the search for binaries in quasicircular orbits and eccentric orbits is not significantly larger for Cosmic Explorer than for Advanced LIGO and is accessible with present-day computational resources. We investigate Cosmic Explorer’s ability to distinguish between circular and eccentric binaries. We estimate that for a binary with a signal-to-noise ratio of 20 (800), Cosmic Explorer can distinguish between a circular binary and a binary with eccentricity e>~1e-2 (1e-3) at 90% confidence. 

This white paper describes the research and development needed over the next decade to realize "Cosmic Explorer," the U.S. node of a future third-generation detector network that will be capable of observing and characterizing compact gravitational-wave sources to cosmological redshifts.