Analysis of birefringence and dispersion effects from spacetime-symmetry breaking in gravitational waves

Understand

In this work, we review the effective field theory framework to search for Lorentz and CPT symmetry breaking during the propagation of gravitational waves.

• The article is written so as to bridge the gap between the theory of spacetime-symmetry breaking and the analysis of gravitational-waves signals detected by ground-based interferometers.
• The primary physical effects beyond General Relativity that we explore here are dispersion and birefringence of gravitational waves.
• We discuss their implementation in the open-source LIGO-Virgo algorithm library suite, as well as the statistical method used to perform a Bayesian inference of the posterior probability of the coefficients for symmetry-breaking.