Gravitational Wave Polarizations: A Test of General Relativity Using Binary Black Hole Mergers

General Relativity predicts that gravitational radiation is purely tensor polarized and thus, gravitational waves are composed of linear combinations of two transverse polarization modes, referred to as plus (+) and cross (×) tensor modes. However, alternate gravitational theories predict the existence of up to four additional vector and scalar longitudinal GW polarization modes. In this thesis, we develop a test of the gravitational wave (GW) polarization prediction of general relativity by searching for small admixtures of vector and/or scalar polarization components in transient GWs from binary black hole mergers. We use a network of five non-co-oriented GW detectors available in the near future, Bayesian inference parameter estimation, and nested sampling to quantify the detection sensitivity for such non-tensor GW polarization components.