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General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology, gr-qc
Abstract:
Gravitational wave observations of compact binary coalescences provide
precision probes of strong-field gravity. There is thus now a standard set of
null tests of general relativity (GR) applied to LIGO-Virgo detections and many
more such tests proposed. However, the relation between all these tests is not
yet well understood. We start to investigate this by applying a set of standard
tests to simulated observations of binary black holes in GR and with
phenomenological deviations from GR. The phenomenological deviations include
self-consistent modifications to the energy flux in an effective-one-body (EOB)
model, the deviations used in the second post-Newtonian (2PN) TIGER and FTA
parameterized tests, and the dispersive propagation due to a massive graviton.
We consider four types of tests: residuals, inspiral-merger-ringdown
consistency, parameterized (TIGER and FTA), and modified dispersion relation.
We also check the consistency of the unmodeled reconstruction of the waveforms
with the waveform recovered using GR templates. These tests are applied to
simulated observations similar to GW150914 with both large and small deviations
from GR and similar to GW170608 just with small deviations from GR. We find
that while very large deviations from GR are picked up with high significance
by almost all tests, more moderate deviations are picked up by only a few
tests, and some deviations are not recognized as GR violations by any test at
the moderate signal-to-noise ratios we consider. Moreover, the tests that
identify various deviations with high significance are not necessarily the
expected ones. We also find that the 2PN (1PN) TIGER and FTA tests recover much
smaller deviations than the true values in the modified EOB (massive graviton)
case. Additionally, we find that of the GR deviations we consider, the
residuals test is only able to detect extreme deviations from GR. (Abridged)
