Quasinormal modes of rotating black holes in higher-derivative gravity

Abstract

We compute the spectrum of linearized gravitational excitations of black holes with substantial angular momentum in the presence of higher-derivative corrections to general relativity. We do so perturbatively to leading order in the higher-derivative couplings and up to order fourteen in the black hole angular momentum. This allows us to accurately predict quasinormal mode frequencies of black holes with spins up to about $70\%$ of the extremal value. For some higher-derivative corrections, we find that sizable rotation enhances the frequency shifts by almost an order of magnitude relative to the static case.

v2: version accepted in PRD. Contains a new plot for the (330) modes and we added a new comment on the accuracy of our results. We make it clear that they are accurate enough to allow for precision tests of higher-derivative corrections in future experiments