Abstract

Despite the ever stronger observational support for general relativity (GR) as our standard model of gravity, open questions concerning, e.g., the nature of dark matter or the reconciliation of GR with quantum physics persist. Most candidate theories of quantum gravity predict modifications to GR in their infra-red limit. Black holes, and the gravitational wave signal emitted during their collision, provide a novel way to probe these underlying theories in the highly nonlinear, dynamical regime of gravity. To do so, however, requires accurate theoretical predictions of the waveforms, an undertaking that is still in its infancy. In this talk I will give a review on the latest progress in ``numerical relativity beyond GR’’, and report our latest results of simulating black holes in Gauss-Bonnet gravity that provide the strongest observational constraints on this theory to-date.