Modified gravitational wave propagations in linearized gravity with Lorentz and diffeomorphism violations and their gravitational wave constraints

TL;DR

This paper investigates how violations of Lorentz symmetry and diffeomorphism invariance in linearized gravity affect gravitational wave propagation, modifies waveforms, and uses LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA data to constrain these violations.

Contribution

It introduces a framework to analyze Lorentz and diffeomorphism violations in gravitational wave propagation and derives constraints from observational data.

Findings

No evidence of Lorentz or diffeomorphism violations in GW data

Provides 90% confidence intervals for violation coefficients

Shows modifications lead to anisotropy, birefringence, and dispersion in gravitational waves

Abstract

The standard model extension (SME) is an effective field theory framework that can be used to study the possible violations of Lorentz symmetry and diffeomorphism invariance in the gravitational interaction. In this paper, we explore both the Lorentz- and diffeomorphism-violating effects on the propagations of gravitational waves in the SME's linearized gravity. It is shown that the violations of Lorentz symmetry and diffeomorphism invariance modify the conventional linear dispersion relation of gravitational waves, leading to anisotropy, birefringence, and dispersion effects in the propagation of gravitational waves. With these modified dispersion relations, we then calculate the dephasing effects due to the Lorentz and diffeomorphism violations in the waveforms of gravitational waves produced by the coalescence of compact binaries. With the distorted waveforms, we perform full Bayesian inference with the help of the open source software \texttt{BILBY} on the gravitational wave events of the compact binary mergers in the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA catalogs GWTC-3. We consider the effects from the operators with the lowest mass dimension $d=2$ and $d=3$ due to the Lorentz and diffeomorphism violations in the linearized gravity. No signature of Lorentz and diffeomorphism violations arsing from the SME's linearized gravity are found for most GW events, which allows us to give a $90\%$ confidence interval for each Lorentz- and diffeomorphism-violating coefficient.