2025/04/29 by Soumen Roy, Roy, Soumen, M. Haney +7 · 5 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #FOS: Physical sciences #General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc) #Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM) #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #Relativity and Gravitational Theory
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2504.21147
openalex publication_date 2025/04/29 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
When testing general relativity (GR) with gravitational wave observations, parametrized tests of deviations from the expected strong-field source dynamics are one of the most widely used techniques. We present an updated version of the parametrized framework with the state-of-art IMRPhenomX waveform family. Our new framework incorporates deviations in the dominant mode as well as in the higher-order modes of the waveform. We demonstrate that the missing physics of either higher-order modes or precession in the parametrized model can lead to a biased conclusion of false deviation from GR. Our new implementation mitigates this issue and enables us to perform the tests for highly asymmetric and precessing binaries without being subject to systematic biases due to missing physics. Finally, we apply the improved test to analyze events observed during the second half of the third observing run of LIGO and Virgo (O3b). We provide constraints on GR deviations by combining O3b results with those from previous observation runs. Our findings show no evidence for violations of GR.