Binary Black Hole gravitational waveform reconstruction with minimal morphological assumptions

The recently published catalog of Gravitational Wave events by the LIGO Virgo Collaboration, GWTC-1, showcases ten Binary Black Hole (BBH) sources whose signal waveforms were recovered using General Relativity (GR) template-based analyses. The catalog also presents signal reconstructions for these events using wavelet-based analyses that make minimal morphological assumptions. These analyses look for short duration, burst-like transients that appear coherently in the data of multiple detectors. Being agnostic to the precise morphology of the waveform, they can in principle offer waveform reconstructions that are robust to modeling errors, offering the potential to verify the presence of higher mode content or deviations from GR, for example. We find the waveforms reconstructed by morphology independent and templated analyses to be consistent within known errors, which lends credence to the inferred parameters and nature of these systems.