Assessing the Inspiral-Merger-Ringdown Consistency Test of General Relativity

The inspiral-merger-ringdowm (IMR) consistency test has become a standard test of general relativity (GR) for signals analyzed by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Colloboration. This test is based on the idea that all the loss in the mass-energy of the binary throughout coalescence should be predicted completely by standard GR. If the observed gravitational waves (GW) lose/retain more mass-energy than expected, this would result in a discrepancy in the final estimated parameters for each portion of the signal. In this talk, we assess the limits of this test by (1) exploring systematic errors by injecting and recovering with different state-of-the-art GW models and (2) simulating signals using non-standard GR numerical relativity simulations. To gain a greater understanding, we simulate multiple of these signals across different parts of parameter space.