Eur. Phys. J. C (2020) 80: 630
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-020-8211-4

Regular Article - Theoretical Physics

Model-independent test of the parity symmetry of gravity with gravitational waves

¹ CAS Key Laboratory for Research in Galaxies and Cosmology, Department of Astronomy, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, 230026, China
² School of Astronomy and Space Sciences, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, 230026, China
³ Department of Physics, The University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Hwy, Crawley, WA, 6009, Australia
⁴ Institute for Theoretical Physics and Cosmology, Zhejiang University of Technology, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, 310032, China
⁵ GCAP-CASPER, Department of Physics, Baylor University, Waco, TX, 76798-7316, USA

^* e-mail: wzhao7@ustc.edu.cn

Received: 23 March 2020
Accepted: 6 July 2020
Published online: 16 July 2020

Abstract

Gravitational wave (GW) data can be used to test the parity symmetry of gravity by investigating the difference between left-hand and right-hand circular polarization modes. In this article, we develop a method to decompose the circular polarizations of GWs produced during the inspiralling stage of compact binaries, with the help of stationary phase approximation. The foremost advantage is that this method is simple, clean, independent of GW waveform, and is applicable to the existing detector network. Applying it to the mock data, we test the parity symmetry of gravity by constraining the velocity birefringence of GWs. If a nearly edge-on binary neutron-stars with observed electromagnetic counterparts at 40 Mpc is detected by the second-generation detector network, one could derive the model-independent test on the parity symmetry in gravity: the lower limit of the energy scale of parity violation can be constrained within .