Constraining parity and Lorentz violations in gravity with future ground- and space-based gravitational wave detectors

TL;DR

Future ground- and space-based gravitational wave detectors will significantly improve constraints on parity and Lorentz violations in gravity, surpassing current bounds and enabling tests of fundamental physics beyond general relativity.

Contribution

This work assesses the potential of upcoming GW detectors to constrain parity and Lorentz violations, introducing models with amplitude and phase corrections in waveforms.

Findings

Ground-based detectors will tighten bounds on violation energy scales compared to current detectors.

Space-based detectors can outperform ground-based ones for certain violation parameters.

Future GW observations can set bounds on graviton mass around 10^{-35} GeV.

Abstract

The future ground- and space-based gravitational wave (GW) detectors offer unprecedented opportunities to test general relativity (GR) with greater precision. In this work, we investigate the capability of future ground-based GW detectors, the Einstein Telescope (ET) and the Cosmic Explorer (CE), and space-based GW detectors, LISA, Taiji, and TianQin, for constraining parity and Lorentz violations in gravity. We inject several typical GW signals from compact binary systems into GW detectors and perform Bayesian inferences with the modified waveforms with parity and Lorentz-violating effects. These effects are modeled in the amplitude and phase corrections to the GW waveforms with their frequency-dependence described by factors $\beta_{\nu}$, $\beta_{\mu}$, $\beta_{\bar \nu}$, and $\beta_{\bar \mu}$. Our results show that the combined observations of ET and CE will impose significantly tighter bounds on the energy scale of parity and Lorentz violations ($M_{\rm PV}$ and $M_{\rm LV}$) compared to those given by LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) detectors. For cases with positive values of $\beta_{\nu}$, $\beta_{\mu}$, $\beta_{\bar \nu}$, and $\beta_{\bar \mu}$, the constraints on $M_{\rm PV}$ and $M_{\rm LV}$ from ground-based detectors are tighter than those from the space-based detectors. For the $\beta_{\mu} = -1$ case, space-based GW detectors provide constraints on $M_{\rm PV}$ that are better than current LVK observations and comparable to those from ET and CE. Additionally, space-based detectors exhibit superior sensitivity in constraining $M_{\rm LV}$ for $\beta_{\bar \mu} = -2$ case, which is approximately three orders of magnitude tighter than those from ground-based GW detectors. This scenario also enables bounds on the graviton mass at $m_g \lesssim 10^{-35}\; {\rm GeV}$. These findings highlight the promising role of future GW observatories in probing fundamental physics beyond GR.