A New Approach to Black Hole Quasinormal Modes: A Review of the Asymptotic Iteration Method

TL;DR

This review introduces the asymptotic iteration method (AIM) for calculating black hole quasinormal modes, demonstrating its advantages, new results, and potential for higher-dimensional black hole analysis.

Contribution

The paper presents the AIM as a unified, efficient approach for computing black hole QNMs, including new results for Kerr and Reissner-Nordstrom black holes.

Findings

AIM successfully computes QNMs for Schwarzschild, RN, and Kerr black holes.

AIM confirms previous results obtained by the continued fraction method.

Comparison shows AIM's advantages over WKB method in certain cases.

Abstract

We discuss an approach to obtaining black hole quasinormal modes (QNMs) using the asymptotic iteration method (AIM), initially developed to solve second order ordinary differential equations. We introduce the standard version of this method and present an improvement more suitable for numerical implementation. We demonstrate that the AIM can be used to find radial QNMs for Schwarzschild, Reissner-Nordstrom (RN) and Kerr black holes in a unified way. An advantage of the AIM over the standard continued fraction method (CFM) is that for differential equations with more than three regular singular points Gaussian eliminations are not required. However, the convergence of the AIM depends on the location of the radial or angular position, choosing the best such position in general remains an open problem. This review presents for the first time the spin 0, 1/2 & 2 QNMs of a Kerr black hole and the gravitational and electromagnetic QNMs of the RN black hole calculated via the AIM, and confirms results previously obtained using the CFM. We also presents some new results comparing the AIM to the WKB method. Finally we emphasize that the AIM is well suited to higher dimensional generalizations and we give an example of doubly rotating black holes.