Generic bounds on dipolar gravitational radiation from inspiralling compact binaries

Abstract

Various alternative theories of gravity predict dipolar gravitational radiation in addition to quadrupolar radiation. We show that gravitational wave (GW) observations of inspiralling compact binaries can put interesting constraints on the strengths of the dipole modes of GW polarizations. We put forward a physically motivated gravitational waveform for dipole modes, in the Fourier domain, in terms of two parameters: one which captures the relative amplitude of the dipole mode with respect to the quadrupole mode (α) and the other a dipole term in the phase (β). We then use this two-parameter representation to discuss typical bounds on their values using GW measurements. We obtain the expected bounds on the amplitude parameter α and the phase parameter β for advanced LIGO (AdvLIGO) and Einstein telescope (ET) noise power spectral densities using Fisher information matrix. AdvLIGO and ET may at best bound α to an accuracy of ∼10−2 and ∼10−3 and β to an accuracy of ∼10−5 and ∼10−6.