Gravitational Wave Polarizations: A Test of General Relativity Using Binary Black Hole Mergers

Citation

Mathur, Sudhi (2020) Gravitational Wave Polarizations: A Test of General Relativity Using Binary Black Hole Mergers. Senior thesis (Major), California Institute of Technology. doi:10.7907/q9qa-7770. https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechTHESIS:08062020-222003579

Abstract

General Relativity predicts that gravitational radiation is purely tensor polarized and thus, gravitational waves are composed of linear combinations of two transverse polarization modes, referred to as plus (+) and cross (×) tensor modes. However, alternate gravitational theories predict the existence of up to four additional vector and scalar longitudinal GW polarization modes.

In this thesis, we develop a test of the gravitational wave (GW) polarization prediction of general relativity by searching for small admixtures of vector and/or scalar polarization components in transient GWs from binary black hole mergers. We use a network of five non-co-oriented GW detectors available in the near future, Bayesian inference parameter estimation, and nested sampling to quantify the detection sensitivity for such non-tensor GW polarization components.

Thesis Files