Greybody Factors Imprinted on Black Hole Ringdowns: an alternative to superposed quasi-normal modes

TL;DR

This paper proposes modeling black hole ringdowns using greybody factors instead of traditional quasi-normal modes, potentially improving gravitational wave data analysis and tests of gravity.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to model black hole ringdowns with greybody factors, avoiding overfitting and start time issues associated with quasi-normal modes.

Findings

Greybody factors effectively model GW ringdowns from Kerr black holes.

Fitting greybody factors allows estimation of black hole mass and spin.

The approach offers a promising alternative for testing gravity with GW data.

Abstract

It is shown that the spectral amplitude of gravitational-wave (GW) ringdown of a Kerr black hole sourced by an extreme mass ratio merger can be modeled by the $\textit{greybody factor}$, which quantifies the scattering nature of the black hole geometry. The estimation of the mass and spin of the remnant is demonstrated by fitting the greybody factor to GW data without using black hole quasi-normal modes. We propose that the ringdown modeling with the greybody factor may strengthen the test of gravity as one can avoid the possible overfitting issue and the start time problem in the ringdown modeling with superposed quasi-normal modes.