Theory-agnostic framework for inspiral tests of general relativity with higher-harmonic gravitational waves

TL;DR

This paper develops a theory-agnostic framework incorporating higher harmonics into gravitational wave tests of general relativity, enabling more comprehensive and flexible analysis of signals from asymmetric mass ratio inspirals.

Contribution

It extends the parameterized post-Einsteinian framework to include higher harmonics up to first post-Newtonian order, providing a versatile waveform model for theory-agnostic tests.

Findings

Deformations of higher harmonic phases can be mapped to dominant harmonic deformations.

Amplitude deformations are more complex and require a simplified ansatz.

The framework captures predictions of all known modified theories to date.

Abstract

Recent gravitational wave observations show evidence for the presence of higher harmonics, thus possibly indicating that these waves were generated in the inspiral of compact objects with asymmetric mass ratios. Signals with higher harmonics contain a trove of information that can lead to a better estimation of system parameters and possibly to more stringent tests of general relativity. Gravitational wave model that include higher harmonics, however, have only been developed within general relativity, while models to test theory-agnostic deviations from general relativity have been purely based on the signal's dominant mode. We here extend the parameterized post-Einsteinian framework to include the $\ell=2, 3$ and $4$ higher harmonics to first post-Newtonian order, therefore providing a ready-to-use Fourier-domain waveform model for tests of general relativity with higher harmonics. We find that the deformations to the higher harmonics of the Fourier phase can be easily mapped to the deformation of the dominant harmonic, while the deformations to the higher-harmonics of the Fourier amplitude in general cannot in a theory-agnostic way. Nonetheless, we develop a simple ansatz for the deformations of the waveform amplitude (through a re-scaling deformation of the time-domain amplitude) that both minimizes the number of independent amplitude deformations parameters and captures the predictions of all known modified theories to date.