Gravitational Waves from a Black Hole Falling Radially into a Thin-Shell Traversable Wormhole

TL;DR

This paper models the gravitational-wave signal from a black hole falling into a traversable wormhole, deriving analytic waveforms and assessing detectability with current detectors.

Contribution

It provides the first analytic waveform expressions for black hole infall into a thin-shell traversable wormhole and evaluates their observational prospects.

Findings

Waveform exhibits a pulse-gap structure from throat crossings.

Signals could be detectable at ~500 Mpc with current ground-based detectors.

Analytic expressions for multipole contributions are derived.

Abstract

We compute the gravitational-wave signal generated by the radial infall of a stellar-mass black hole into a thin-shell Schwarzschild traversable wormhole. Modeling the black hole as a test particle, we derive analytic expressions for the emitted waveform, including contributions from the mass quadrupole and higher-order multipoles. The resulting signal exhibits a characteristic pulse-gap structure associated with repeated throat crossings. We further compute the amplitude spectral density and compare it with representative ground-based detector sensitivities, finding that such signals could lie within the sensitivity range for optimally oriented sources at distances of order ~500 Mpc. These results provide a potential observational signature of traversable wormholes in gravitational-wave data.