Functional inference on deviations from General Relativity

Costantino Pacilio; Riccardo Buscicchio

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arXiv · 2507.13454

Functional inference on deviations from General Relativity

Costantino Pacilio·Riccardo Buscicchio

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Abstract

Extensions of general relativity often predict modifications to gravitational waveform morphology that depend functionally on source parameters, such as the masses and spins of coalescing black holes. However, current analyses of strong-field gravity lack robust, data-driven methods to infer such functional dependencies. In this work, we introduce GRANITA, a non-perturbative, theory-agnostic framework to characterize parameter-dependent deviations from general relativity using Gaussian process regression. Leveraging the flexibility of this method, we analyze both simulated data and real events from the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA public catalog. We demonstrate the ability of our approach to detect and quantify waveform deviations across the parameter space. Furthermore, we show that the method can identify stochastic (non-deterministic) deviations, potentially arising from environmental effects or subdominant unmodeled physics. As gravitational-wave tests of strong gravity advance in precision, our framework provides a principled approach to constrain modified gravity and to mitigate contamination from astrophysical or instrumental systematics.

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Costantino Pacilio, Riccardo Buscicchio. 2025-07-17. Functional inference on deviations from General Relativity. https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13454

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