The influence of mass-ratio in extreme-mass-ratio inspirals for testing general relativity

The popular waveform templates of extreme-mass-ratio inspirals usually omit the mass-ratio in the conservative dynamics, and employ adiabatic approximation to include the radiation reaction. With the help of effective-one-body dynamics, we investigate the influence of mass-ratio in the conservative part on the gravitational waves. We find that for the extra-relativistic orbits, the mass-ratio can produce obvious orbital dephasing even for very small mass-ratio and then affect the waveforms. More importantly, it is noted that omitting the mass-ratio in waveform templates may induce a fake signal of deviation from general relativity.