Probing higher-spin particles with gravitational waves from compact binary inspirals

Understand

Under the framework of gravitational effective field theory, we propose a theory agnostic strategy of searching for higher-spin particles with gravitational waves from compact binary inspirals.

• Using this strategy, we analyze gravitational wave signals from the binary black hole merger events GW151226 and GW170608, as well as the binary neutron star merger event GW170817.
• We find that the existence of higher-spin particles with mass ranged from $10^{-12} {\rm eV}$ to $10^{-11} {\rm eV}$ is strongly disfavored by these events unless the particles precisely combine within a supersymmetric supermultiplet.
• We argue that the gravitational effective field theory also provides a framework to search for signals beyond GR from other GW observations, such as extreme-mass-ratio-inspirals.