Stability of the fundamental quasinormal mode in time-domain observations against small perturbations

TL;DR

This paper investigates the robustness of the fundamental quasinormal mode in black hole gravitational wave signals, demonstrating its stability against small environmental perturbations, which supports the reliability of black hole spectroscopy.

Contribution

It clarifies the physical response of time-domain signals to small potential perturbations and shows the fundamental mode remains stable, enhancing confidence in black hole spectroscopy.

Findings

Fundamental mode amplitude changes are parametrically small under perturbations.

Time-domain signals are stable against small potential perturbations.

Overtones stability requires further study.

Abstract

Black hole spectroscopy with gravitational waves is an important tool to measure the mass and spin of astrophysical black holes and to test their Kerr nature. Next-generation ground- and space-based detectors will observe binary black hole mergers with large signal-to-noise ratios and perform spectroscopy routinely. It was recently shown that small perturbations due, e.g., to environmental effects (the "flea") to the effective potential governing gravitational-wave generation and propagation in black hole exteriors (the "elephant") can lead to arbitrarily large changes in the black hole's quasinormal spectrum, including the fundamental mode, which is expected to dominate the observed signal. This raises an important question: is the black hole spectroscopy program robust against perturbations? We clarify the physical behavior of time-domain signals under small perturbations in the potential, and we show that changes in the amplitude of the fundamental mode in the prompt ringdown signal are parametrically small. This implies that the fundamental quasinormal mode extracted from the observable time-domain signal is stable against small perturbations. The stability of overtones deserves further investigation.