Modeling ringdown: Beyond the fundamental quasinormal modes

By L. London, J. Healy, D. Shoemaker. 2014

148 citations recorded by the source corpus.

While black hole perturbation theory predicts a rich quasi-normal mode structure, technical challenges have limited the numerical study of excitations to the fundamental, lowest order modes caused by the coalescence of black holes. Here, we present a robust method to identify quasi-normal mode excitations beyond the fundamentals within currently available numerical relativity waveforms. In applying this method to waveforms of initially non-spinning black hole binaries, of mass ratios 1 to 15, we find not only the fundamental quasi-normal mode amplitudes, but also overtones, and evidence for 2nd order quasi-normal modes. We find that the mass-ratio dependence of quasi-normal mode excitation is very well modeled by a Post-Newtonian like sum in symmetric mass ratio. Concurrently, we find that the mass ratio dependence of some quasi-normal modes is qualitatively different from their Post-Newtonian inspired counterparts, suggesting that the imprints of nonlinear merger are more evident in some modes than in others. We present new fitting formulas for the related quasi-normal mode excitations, as well as for remnant black hole spin and mass. We also discuss the relevance of our results in terms of gravitational wave detection and characterization.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Ocean Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2008a9872bfb5716ec4c6bdb79c2c31f23c72217

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Citations in the corpus

Tests of general relativity with the binary black hole signals from the LIGO-Virgo catalog GWTC-1 (2019, methodology): “The waveform models used in this paper do not include the effects of subdominant (non-quadrupole) modes, which are expected to be small for comparable-mass binaries [70, 71].”
Black Hole Ringdown: The Importance of Overtones (2019, background): “[33], the ringdown portion of the waveform is considered to be 10M after the peak luminosity of the Newman-Penrose scalar Ψ4 (related to two time derivatives of h).”