Gravitational Wave Implications for the Parity Symmetry of Gravity in the High Energy Region

Abstract

Einstein's general relativity, as the most successful theory of gravity, is one of the cornerstones of modern physics. However, the experimental tests for gravity in the high energy region are limited. The emerging gravitational-wave astronomy has opened an avenue for probing the fundamental properties of gravity in a strong and dynamical field, and in particular, a high energy regime. In this work, we test the parity conservation of gravity with gravitational waves. If the parity symmetry is broken, the left- and right-handed modes of gravitational waves would follow different equations of motion, dubbed as birefringence. We perform full Bayesian inference by comparing the state-of-the-art waveform with parity violation with the compact binary coalescence data released by LIGO and Virgo collaboration. We do not find any violations of general relativity, thus constrain the lower bound of the parity-violating energy scale to be 0.09 GeV through the velocity birefringence of gravitational waves. This provides the most stringent experimental test of gravitational parity symmetry to date. We also find third generation gravitational-wave detectors can enhance this bound to GeV if there is still no violation, comparable to the current energy scale in particle physics, which indicates gravitational-wave astronomy can usher in a new era of testing the ultraviolet behavior of gravity in the high energy region.

Gravitational wave constraints on Lorentz and parity violations in gravity: high-order spatial derivative cases

“…In this paper we will consider the velocity birefringence effects only. With the GW events detected by LIGO and Virgo, the GW constraints on the parity-violating birefringence for β µ = 1 [60,61] and β µ = −1 [62] have been obtained by comparing the modified waveforms with GW data. With these constraints, one is able to infer the gravitational wave constraints on the corresponding parity-violating gravities.…”

“…δ 2 term) in (3.10) from GWTC-1 and GWTC-2 has been derived in [11,12]. For parity violating effects, labeled by µ A , the observational constraint on the effect of the first term in (3.12) has been considered in [58,60,61]. In this paper, we will not consider δ 1 and δ 2 terms, and concentrate on the effects of δ 3 and δ 4 on GWs and their constriants from GW data.…”

“…The observational constraints on the terms with coefficients W 1 , W 2 , and G 1 by using GW data can be infered directly from the anlysis in [11,12,[58][59][60][61]. In this paper, we will focus on the observational constraints on W 3 and W 4 , which can arise from the fifth-order and sixth-order spatial derivative terms in the action of gravity with spatial covariance.…”

“…Recently, a lot of tests on both the Lorentz symmetry and parity symmetry of gravitational interaction have been carried out by using the observational data from GW events in LIGO-Virgo catalogs [55][56][57][58][59][60][61]. In all these works, only the effects of Lorentz and parity violation due to the leading spatial derivatives have been considered.…”

Analysis of Birefringence and Dispersion Effects from Spacetime-Symmetry Breaking in Gravitational Waves

“…Recent work has begun to look at the available GW catalog to place constraints on coefficients describing Lorentz violation for gravity [48][49][50]. Additionally, closely related searches for parameterizations of deviations from General Relativity have been completed [3,4,24,51].…”