Nonlinear effect of absorption on the ringdown of a spinning black hole

Abstract

The ringdown gravitational wave signal arising e.g., in the final stage of a black hole binary merger, contains important information about the properties of the remnant, and can potentially be used to perform clean tests of general relativity. However, interpreting the ringdown signal, in particular when it is the loudest, requires understanding the role of nonlinearities and their potential impact on modelling this phase using quasinormal modes. Here, we focus on a particular nonlinear effect arising from the change in the black hole's mass and spin due to the partial absorption of a quasinormal perturbation. We isolate and systematically study this third-order, secular effect by evolving the equations governing linear metric perturbations on the background of a spinning black hole, but allowing the properties of the background to evolve in a prescribed way. We find that this leads to the excitation of quasinormal modes with higher polar angular number, retrograde modes (counter-rotating with respect to the black hole), and overtones, as well as giving rise to a component of the signal at early times that cannot be fully described using quasinormal modes. Quantifying these effects, we find that they may be relevant in analyzing the ringdown in black hole mergers.

29 pages, 16 figures

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Cited by in corpus (10)

• Overtones and Nonlinearities in Binary Black Hole Ringdowns
• Ringdown amplitudes of nonspinning eccentric binaries
• Hyperboloidal Approach to Quasinormal Modes
• Systematic biases due to waveform mismodeling in parametrized post-Einsteinian tests of general relativity: The impact of neglecting spin precession and higher modes
• Late-time tails in nonlinear evolutions of merging black holes
• Merging black holes with Cauchy-characteristic matching: Computation of late-time tails
• Dynamical quasinormal mode excitation
• Quadratic Mode Couplings in Rotating Black Holes and Their Detectability
• Sourced Carrollian Fluids Dual to Black Hole Horizons
• Numerical computation of electromagnetically sourced nonlinear tails