Testing general relativity in the strong-field and highly dynamical regime is now possible through current gravitational-wave observations, where even a single high-quality detection can place competitive constraints on deviations from Einstein’s theory. The parametrized post-Einsteinian framework provides a theory-agnostic approach to search for such deviations, but it typically assumes that systematic uncertainties in the base waveform model, particularly those arising from calibration to numerical relativity, are negligible. In this work, we investigate how calibration errors in the late-inspiral fitting coefficients of the IMRPhenomD waveform model can lead to spurious detections of departures from general relativity in parametrized tests. We use an uncertainty-aware version of IMRPhenomD, recalibrated to a set of numerical relativity surrogate waveforms and equipped with a probabilistic description of its fitting coefficients, to simulate general-relativity-consistent signals. We inject these signals into an O5 ground-based detector network and recover them with the original IMRPhenomD model augmented with a parametrized post-Einsteinian phase deformation. We find that false violations of general relativity using this model arise for network signal-to-noise ratios as low as 60. When the uncertainty-aware model is used instead, the inferred parametrized post-Einsteinian phase deformation remains consistent with zero even for signals with a signal-to-noise ratio up to 330. These results demonstrate the need to account for numerical relativity calibration uncertainty in order to perform reliable inspiral tests of general relativity. They also illustrate that explicitly incorporating numerical relativity calibration uncertainty into the waveform model preserves our ability to robustly test general relativity.

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• Alternative gravity theories
• Classical black holes
• Gravitational wave detection
• Gravitational waves