Probing beyond-Kerr spacetimes with inspiral-ringdown corrections to gravitational waves

Abstract

Gravitational waves from the explosive merger of distant black holes are encoded with details regarding the complex extreme-gravity spacetime present at their source. Famously described by the Kerr spacetime metric for rotating black holes in general relativity, what if effects beyond this theory are present? One way to efficiently test this hypothesis is to first obtain a metric which parametrically deviates from the Kerr metric in a model-independent way. Given such a metric, one can then predict the ensuing corrections to both the inspiral and ringdown portions of the gravitational waveform for black holes present in the new spacetime. With these tools in hand, one can then test gravitational wave signals for such effects by two different methods, (i) inspiral-merger-ringdown consistency test, and (ii) parameterized test. In this paper, we demonstrate the exact recipe one needs to do just this. We first derive parameterized corrections to the waveform inspiral, ringdown, and remnant properties for a generic non-Kerr spacetime and apply this to two example beyond-Kerr spacetimes each parameterized by a single non-Kerr parameter. We then predict the beyond-Kerr parameter magnitudes required in an observed gravitational wave signal to be statistically inconsistent with the Kerr case in general relativity. We find that the two methods give very similar bounds. The constraints found with existing gravitational-wave events are comparable to those from x-ray observations, while future gravitational-wave observations using Cosmic Explorer (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna) can improve such bounds by two (three) orders of magnitude.