Biases in Ringdown Tests of General Relativity from Gravitational-Wave Microlensing

Abstract

Gravitational-wave (GW) ringdown signals provide a powerful probe of the strong-field regime of general relativity (GR) through black hole spectroscopy and tests of the Kerr hypothesis. However, unmodeled propagation effects can bias the inference of remnant properties and the interpretation of ringdown features. We investigate the impact of gravitational lensing on ringdown inference and tests of GR using GW150914-like simulated signals spanning the long-wavelength, wave-optics, and geometric-optics regimes. We perform complementary time-domain post-merger and frequency-domain full inspiral--merger--ringdown analyses using unlensed waveform models. We find that lensing in the wave-optics regime can produce substantial biases in the inferred remnant mass and spin and can strongly affect the inferred modal content of the ringdown. In particular, it can spuriously favor the presence of the first overtone, with $\log_{10}\mathcal{B}^{221}_{220}\sim40$, even though the injected signal has no support for it. Parameterized ringdown tests can likewise yield strong apparent support for deviations from the Kerr quasinormal mode (QNM) spectrum, with $\log_{10}\mathcal{B}^{\rm modGR}_{\rm GR}\sim8$. In contrast, the evidence for higher-order modes remains largely unchanged for the simulated signals considered here. The parameterized analysis using the entire signal further shows that microlensing can bias the inferred frequency of the dominant $(2,2,0)$ QNM. These results demonstrate that unmodeled microlensing can produce systematic biases and spurious signatures in ringdown analyses, potentially affecting precision tests of the Kerr hypothesis.