Efforts are underway to improve the design and sensitivity of gravitational waves detectors, with the hope that the next generation of these detectors will observe a gravitational wave signal. Such a signal will not only provide information on dynamics in the strong gravity regime that characterizes potential sources of gravitational waves, but will also serve as a decisive test for alternative theories of gravitation that are consistent with all other current experimental observations.

We study the linearized theory of the tensor-vector-scalar theory of gravity (TeVeS), an alternative theory of gravity designed to explain the apparent deficit of visible matter in galaxies and clusters of galaxies without postulating yet undetected dark matter, and find the polarization states and propagation speeds for gravitational waves. We show that in addition to the usual transverse-traceless propagation modes, there are two more transverse modes and a trace mode, and a second trace mode related to the scalar field, which might be suppressed, depending on the magnitude of the gradient of the scalar field perturbation. Additionally, the propagation speeds are different from c.

These characteristics are not present in the general relativity solution for gravitational waves, and can therefore be used to discern between TeVeS and general relativity.