The field of gravitational waves is about to enter a new era, with instruments such as LISA, the Einstein Telescope, or Cosmic Explorer expected to become operational in the next decade or two. All of these instruments will enable us to measure many interesting properties of the Universe, such as the distribution of spins and masses of black holes or the Hubble constant, with a precision that will be unparalleled in gravitational wave astrophysics. The general expectation is that by the time these instruments begin their life cycles, systematic biases at today’s levels would be the limiting factor on the accuracy with which astrophysical and cosmological parameters can be inferred. This creates a need to eliminate or control those biases by that time. In this thesis, we examine various aspects of this field of waveform systematics, starting with a linear-order description of the topic, the Fisher matrix formalism. In addition to reviewing well-established results, we also cover a recent advancement named alignment, showing that and how it can be expected to outperform the original formula. We then continue to apply the Fisher matrix formalism to two other topics. First, a newly proposed model to describe waveform errors and the induced systematic biases is analyzed. This includes a description of the model itself, along with thoughts on its interplay with some of the existing infrastructure used by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaborations. After that, both Fisher matrix estimation and parameter estimation are used to study the model. In the second project, we outline how to quantify systematic biases in a catalog of publicly available gravitational wave events. We proceed by comparing Fisher matrix and catalog results, and provide a comprehensive discussion of factors that could potentially contaminate the results of the analysis.
Max Melching (Wed,) studied this question.