Tests of General Relativity with Binary Black Holes from the second LIGO-Virgo Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog
By The Ligo Scientific Collaboration, T. Abbott, T. Abbott, S. Abraham, F. Acernese, K. Ackley, A. Adams, C. Adams, Rana X. Adhikari, V. Adya and 1,334 more. 2020
495 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Gravitational waves enable tests of general relativity in the highly dynamical and strong-field regime. Using events detected by LIGO-Virgo up to 1 October 2019, we evaluate the consistency of the data with predictions from the theory. We first establish that residuals from the best-fit waveform are consistent with detector noise, and that the low- and high-frequency parts of the signals are in agreement. We then consider parametrized modifications to the waveform by varying post-Newtonian and phenomenological coefficients, improving past constraints by factors of ${\sim}2$; we also find consistency with Kerr black holes when we specifically target signatures of the spin-induced quadrupole moment. Looking for gravitational-wave dispersion, we tighten constraints on Lorentz-violating coefficients by a factor of ${\sim}2.6$ and bound the mass of the graviton to $m_g \leq 3.09 \times 10^{-23} \mathrm{eV}/c^2$ with 90% credibility. We also analyze the properties of the merger remnants by measuring ringdown frequencies and damping times, constraining fractional deviations away from the Kerr frequency to $\delta \hat{f}_{220} = 0.03^{+0.38}_{-0.35}$ for the fundamental quadrupolar mode, and $\delta \hat{f}_{221} = 0.02^{+0.29}_{-0.33}$ for the first overtone; additionally, we find no evidence for postmerger echoes. Finally, we determine that our data are consistent with tensorial polarizations through a template-independent method. When possible, we assess the validity of general relativity based on collections of events analyzed jointly. We find no evidence for new physics beyond general relativity, for black hole mimickers, or for any unaccounted systematics.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b31e29a0c1b7104e312a1cbc5b75cb74d858cdec
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Astronomy and Astrophysics
Citations in the corpus
- Two populations of LIGO-Virgo black holes (2020, methodology): “established gravitational wave astronomy. So far, the results have already provided additional conrmation that with good accuracy all gravitational observables can be described by General Relativity [2,3]. The recently released GWTC-2 dataset [4], including the data from the rst half of the third ob”
- GWTC-2: Compact Binary Coalescences Observed by LIGO and Virgo During the First Half of the Third Observing Run (2020, methodology): “The BW analysis uses the same selection of BBH candidate events as are used for testing general relativity [36].”