Testing General Relativity with Black Hole Quasi-Normal Modes

Understand

The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of the exciting field of black hole quasi-normal modes and its capabilities to test general relativity in the 21st century.

• After motivating this line of research, we provide a qualitative introduction to the concept of quasi-normal modes and outline black hole perturbation theory.
• With the perturbation equations at hand, we discuss common methods to compute the quasi-normal mode spectrum and compare the advantages and disadvantages of each approach.
• We also provide an overview of possible deviations from general relativity and how they modify the quasi-normal mode spectrum of black holes from a theoretical point of view.