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GR: Fachverband Gravitation, Relativistische Astrophysik und Kosmologie

GR 2: Gravitational Waves I

GR 2.5: Talk

Monday, March 16, 2026, 17:15–17:30, KH 01.016

Accounting for the Known Unknowns: Systematic Waveform Errors in Gravitational-Wave Analyses — •Frank Ohme^{1, 2}, Sumit Kumar^{1, 3}, and Max Melching^{1, 4} — ¹Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, Hannover, Germany — ²Leibniz University, Hannover, Germany — ³Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands — ⁴California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, USA

The analysis of gravitational-wave observations relies heavily on models of the instrument noise and the expected signal shape. While models of the instrument's calibration and its noise naturally incorporate some uncertainty, the signal templates are typically treated as perfect. However, we know that this is an idealisation. In this talk, I present a versatile and robust method to incorporate systematic waveform-model uncertainties in the analysis of compact binary mergers. I show that treating signal models as uncertain may decrease the accuracy of the inferred source parameters, but otherwise ignored systematic biases are also reduced. Applying our method to real events, I illustrate that instead of losing accuracy, the main effect is to gain confidence in any results that remain robust with respect to the introduction of systematic errors.

Keywords: gravitational waves; data anlysis; systematic errors; parameter estimation