Ringdown mode amplitudes of precessing binary black holes

Understand

The ringdown phase of a binary black-hole merger encodes key information about the remnant properties and provides a direct probe of the strong-field regime of General Relativity.

• While quasi-normal mode frequencies and damping times are well understood within black-hole perturbation theory, their excitation amplitudes remain challenging to model, as they depend on the merger phase.
• The complexity increases for precessing black-hole binaries, where multiple emission modes can contribute comparably to the ringdown.
• In this paper, we investigate the phenomenology of precessing binary black hole ringdowns using the SXS numerical relativity simulations catalog.