Black Hole Spectroscopy: Systematic Errors and Ringdown Energy Estimates

Understand

The relaxation of a distorted black hole to its final state provides important tests of general relativity within the reach of current and upcoming gravitational wave facilities.

• In black hole perturbation theory, this phase consists of a simple linear superposition of exponentially damped sinusoids (the quasinormal modes) and of a power-law tail.
• How many quasinormal modes are necessary to describe waveforms with a prescribed precision? What error do we incur by only including quasinormal modes, and not tails? What other systematic effects are present in current state-of-the-art numerical waveforms? These issues, which are basic to testing fundamental physics with distorted black holes, have hardly been addressed in the literature.
• We use numerical relativity waveforms and accurate evolutions within black hole perturbation theory to provide some answers.