Fundamental physics implications on higher-curvature theories from the binary black hole signals in the LIGO-Virgo Catalog GWTC-1

Abstract

Gravitational-wave astronomy offers not only new vistas into the realm of astrophysics, but it also opens an avenue for probing, for the first time, general relativity in its strong-field, nonlinear, and dynamical regime, where the theory's predictions manifest themselves in their full glory. We present a study of whether the gravitational wave events detected so far by the LIGO-Virgo scientific collaborations can be used to probe higher-curvature corrections to general relativity. In particular, we focus on two examples: Einstein-dilaton-Gauss-Bonnet and dynamical Chern-Simons gravity. We find that the two events with a low-mass $m\approx 7M_{\odot }$ BH (GW151226 and GW170608) place stringent constraints on Einstein-dilaton-Gauss-Bonnet gravity, ${\alpha }_{\mathrm{EdGB}}^{1/2}\lesssim 5.6$ km, whereas dynamical Chern-Simons gravity remains unconstrained by the gravitational-wave observations analyzed.

v1: 6 pages, 1 figure. v2: matches published version. v3: errors corrected in Eq. (3) and Table I