• Accepted Paper

Gravitational waveforms from binaries in higher-derivative gravity

Pablo A. Cano, Francesco Fucito, Jose F. Morales, and Alejandro Ruipérez

Phys. Rev. D - Accepted 5 October, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/c6w8-zxbt

Abstract

We study the emission of gravitational waves by a test particle orbiting a nonrotating black hole in higher-derivative gravity theories with cubic and quartic contractions of the Riemann tensor. To this aim, we rst derive the master equations describing even- and odd-parity perturbations in the presence of an arbitrary source term, and then construct a Post-Minkowskian expansion of the solutions to the homogeneous master equations. Specializing to a circular binary system, we compute the Post-Newtonian expansion of the waveform, as well as the energy and angular-momentum uxes at innity. We show that higher-derivative corrections to the waveform and to the uxes always appear at 5PN order, and are universally proportional to the Love number describing the deformability of the geometry under the ℓ = 2 mode perturbation. These analytical results are validated against numerical computations, which also allow us to extend the analysis to larger velocities.

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