Excitation of Kerr quasinormal modes in extreme--mass-ratio inspirals

Understand

If a small compact object orbits a black hole, it is known that it can excite the black hole's quasinormal modes (QNMs), leading to high-frequency oscillations ("wiggles") in the radiated field at $\mathcal{J}^+$, and in the radiation-reaction self-force acting on the object after its orbit passes through periapsis.

• Here we survey the phenomenology of these wiggles across a range of black hole spins and equatorial orbits.
• In both the scalar-field and gravitational cases we find that wiggles are a generic feature across a wide range of parameter space, and that they are observable in field perturbations at fixed spatial positions, in the self-force, and in radiated fields at $\mathcal{J}^+$.
• For a given charge or mass of the small body, the QNM excitations have the highest amplitudes for systems with a highly spinning central black hole, a prograde orbit with high eccentricity, and an orbital periapsis close to the light ring.