Abstract

The gravitational wave signals from compact binaries detected by LIGO and Virgo provide the only way we currently have of testing the predictions of general relativity in the strong field, highly dynamical regime. Binary black holes are particularly well-suited to such tests, since they are very clean laboratories and often have large enough masses that the coalescence occurs in the detectors’ most sensitive band. I will describe the four tests performed on all the significant binary black hole detections from the first LIGO & Virgo catalogue. Two of these tests check the consistency of the residuals with noise and the consistency of the low- and high-frequency parts of the signal. The other two tests check that parameterized deviations in the waveform model—including in the post-Newtonian coefficients—are consistent with zero and that the propagation of the waves is nondispersive. These tests reveal no evidence for deviations from general relativity, and the combined constraints improve previous constraints by factors of up to 2.4.