Gravitational wave tests of general relativity with the parameterized post-Einsteinian framework

By N. Cornish, L. Sampson, N. Yunes, Frans Pretorius. 2011

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Gravitational wave astronomy has tremendous potential for studying extreme astrophysical phenomena and exploring fundamental physics. The waves produced by binary black hole mergers will provide a pristine environment in which to study strong field, dynamical gravity. Extracting detailed information about these systems requires accurate theoretical models of the gravitational wave signals. If gravity is not described by General Relativity, analyses that are based on waveforms derived from Einstein's field equations could result in parameter biases and a loss of detection efficiency. A new class of "parameterized post-Einsteinian" (ppE) waveforms has been proposed to cover this eventuality. Here we apply the ppE approach to simulated data from a network of advanced ground based interferometers (aLIGO/aVirgo) and from a future spaced based interferometer (LISA). Bayesian inference and model selection are used to investigate parameter biases, and to determine the level at which departures from general relativity can be detected. We find that in some cases the parameter biases from assuming the wrong theory can be severe. We also find that gravitational wave observations will beat the existing bounds on deviations from general relativity derived from the orbital decay of binary pulsars by a large margin across a wide swath of parameter space.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/02fefa8a46d4159c821281fdc37afbaa57251e8d

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Citations in the corpus

Delayed outflows from black hole accretion tori following neutron star binary coalescence (2013, background): “…properties of the merging binary (e.g., Ajith et al. 2007; van der Sluys et al. 2008); a potential probe of the equation of state of dense matter (e.g., Faber et al. 2002; Shibata 2005; Read et al. 2009; Bauswein et al. 2012); and even a test of General Relativity itself (e.g. Cornish et al. 2011).”
Doing Science with eLISA: Astrophysics and Cosmology in the Millihertz Regime (2012, methodology): “The relatively large strength of the inspiral gravitational wave signal will allow a sensitive test of GR by comparing the rate of the observed inspiral (phase evolution) to predictions of the PN approximation to GR (Cornish et al., 2011, Huwyler et al., 2011, Li et al., 2011, Mishra et al., 2010).”