11:00 am–12:00 pm ERC 401
Ethan Payne (Caltech) "Addressing assumptions in gravitational-wave tests of general relativity"
Gravitational-wave observations have opened up the possibility of testing general relativity in extreme spacetimes that were previously inaccessible. Most approaches focus on inferring deviations from the expected signal from binary black hole mergers, which are then combined to provide deviation constraints from an ensemble of detections. While this procedure is important for testing general relativity, care is needed to avoid untoward biases due to various assumptions and approximations. Two such assumptions are that current searches for gravitational-wave signals with waveforms from general relativity are sufficient to detect a signal with a deviation, and that measurements of deviation parameters are independent of the astrophysical source. I will demonstrate how we can address the resulting biases from these approximations and their impact on constraints from the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration’s third observing run.
