Multipolar gravitational waveforms and ringdowns generated during the plunge from the innermost stable circular orbit into a Schwarzschild black hole

TL;DR

This paper analyzes gravitational waveforms generated during a particle's plunge into a Schwarzschild black hole, highlighting the importance of higher harmonics and observation angles for accurate waveform modeling in binary black hole mergers.

Contribution

It provides regularized multipolar waveforms for arbitrary observation directions during plunge, emphasizing the role of higher modes and observation angles in waveform analysis.

Findings

Excellent agreement between regularized and unregularized waveforms

Higher harmonics significantly affect waveform distortion

Observation angle impacts waveform features

Abstract

We study the gravitational radiation emitted by a massive point particle plunging from slightly below the innermost stable circular orbit into a Schwarzschild black hole. We consider both even- and odd-parity perturbations and describe them using the two gauge-invariant master functions of Cunningham, Price, and Moncrief. We obtain, for arbitrary directions of observation and, in particular, outside the orbital plane of the plunging particle, the regularized multipolar waveforms, i.e., the waveforms constructed by summing over of a large number of modes, and their unregularized counterparts constructed from the quasinormal-mode spectrum. They are in excellent agreement and our results permit us to especially emphasize the impact on the distortion of the waveforms of (i) the harmonics beyond the dominant $(\ell=2,m=\pm 2)$ modes and (ii) the direction of observation, and therefore the necessity to take them into account in the analysis of the last phase of binary black hole coalescence.