Parameterized Post-Einsteinian Gravitational Waveforms in Various Modified Theories of Gravity

TL;DR

This paper derives parameterized gravitational waveforms for inspiraling binaries in various modified gravity theories, enabling more comprehensive tests of gravity beyond general relativity using gravitational wave data.

Contribution

It extends previous waveform models by including amplitude corrections, varying gravitational constants, and mass variations, providing a more complete framework for testing modified theories.

Findings

Derived relations between waveform corrections and frequency evolution.

Extended waveform models to include amplitude and gravitational constant variations.

Corrected errors in previous literature on waveform derivations.

Abstract

Despite the tremendous success of general relativity so far, modified theories of gravity have received increased attention lately, motivated from both theoretical and observational aspects. Gravitational wave observations opened new possibilities for testing the viability of such theories in the strong-field regime. One could test each theory against observed data one at a time, though a more efficient approach would be to first probe gravity in a theory-agnostic way and map such information to that on specific theories afterward. One example of such model-independent tests with gravitational waves is the parameterized post-Einsteinian formalism, where one introduces generic parameters in the amplitude and phase that capture non-Einsteinian effects. In this paper, we derive gravitational waveforms from inspiraling compact binaries in various modified theories of gravity that violate at least one fundamental pillar in general relativity. We achieve this by deriving relations between corrections to the waveform amplitude/phase and those to the frequency evolution and Kepler's third law, since the latter two have already been (or can easily be) derived in many theories. Such an analysis allows us to derive corrections to the waveform amplitude, which extends many of previous works that focused on phase corrections only. Moreover, we derive gravitational waveforms in theories with varying gravitational constant. We extend the previous work by introducing two gravitational constants (the conservative one entering in the binding energy and the dissipative one entering in the gravitational wave luminosity) and allowing masses of binary constituents to vary with time. We also correct some errors in previous literature. Our results can be used to improve current analyses of testing general relativity as well as to achieve new projected constraints on many modified theories of gravity.