Null test of general relativity based on gravitational waves

Abstract

Several hundreds of gravitational wave events have been detected. They are good tools to investigate various fundamental problems, including tests of general relativity (GR) theory. Among the GR test schemes based on gravitational wave data, the parameterized scheme has been extensively studied by many groups including the LIGO-VIRGO-KAGRA collaboration (LVK). Existing results indicate that the deviation parameters from GR are small. In the current paper, we would like to estimate whether these deviation parameters are small enough to confirm GR. We transform the deviation parameters into mass--mass relations and, by comparing the resulting mass--mass relations from different parameters, we can estimate the probabilities that the data favor the GR theory. Applying our null test scheme to five O1/O2 binary black hole events, we find some GR deviation signatures but they are not conclusive yet. We also find no monotonic correlation between the network SNR and the strength of GR deviation, suggesting that the observed tensions are not simply driven by signal strength. Our null test scheme can be easily generalized and applied to all gravitational wave observation data.