Constraining the mass of the graviton using coalescing black-hole binaries

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Abstract

We study how well the mass of the graviton can be constrained from gravitational-wave (GW) observations of coalescing binary black holes. Whereas the previous investigations employed post-Newtonian (PN) templates describing only the inspiral part of the signal, the recent progress in analytical and numerical relativity has provided analytical waveform templates coherently describing the inspiral-merger-ringdown (IMR) signals. We show that a search for binary black holes employing IMR templates will be able to constrain the mass of the graviton much more accurately ($\ensuremath{\sim}$ an order of magnitude) than a search employing PN templates. The best expected bound from GW observatories (${\ensuremath{\lambda}}_{g}>7.8\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}{10}^{13}\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{km}$ from Advanced LIGO, ${\ensuremath{\lambda}}_{g}>7.1\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}{10}^{14}\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{km}$ from Einstein Telescope, and ${\ensuremath{\lambda}}_{g}>5.9\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}{10}^{17}\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{km}$ from LISA) are several orders of magnitude better than the best available model-independent bound (${\ensuremath{\lambda}}_{g}>2.8\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}{10}^{12}\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{km}$, from solar system tests).

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