Numerical computation of electromagnetically sourced nonlinear tails

Abstract

Amazingly, recent studies indicate that nonlinear effects are of great significance for modelling black hole ringdown. Transient electromagnetic events in the astrophysical environment are typically high energetic, potentially responsible for some nonlinearities in ringdown. Motivated by the desire to understand these nonlinearities, we solve the inhomogeneous Bardeen-Press-Teukolsky equation numerically, and find second-order gravitational tails induced by an electromagnetic source. Our results suggest that the second-order tails of curvature perturbations with multipole numbers $l\ge 4$ decay as $t^{-2l-2}$ at fixed spatial position and $u^{-l-3}$ in retarded-time $u$ at null infinity, slower than their linear counterparts, which can play a role in multi-messenger observations.

20 pages, 10 figures. Version published in PRD (two footnotes added, some typos corrected, fig. 7 replaced, one reference added and codes available)