2018/09/10 by Vishal Baibhav, Emanuele Berti
Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomy #Astrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Materials science #Multi-mode optical fiber #Optical fiber #Optics #Physics #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #Spectroscopy #astro-ph.HE #gr-qc
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.99.024005
published as Phys. Rev. D 99, 024005 (2019) · 11 pages, 7 figures, 2 tables
arxiv created 2018/09/10 · openalex publication_date 2019/01/02 · arxiv updated 2019/01/09 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
The first two LIGO/Virgo observing runs have detected several black hole binary mergers. One of the most exciting prospects of future observing runs is the possibility to identify the remnants of these mergers as Kerr black holes by measuring their (complex) quasinormal mode frequencies. This idea---similar to the identification of atomic elements through their spectral lines---is sometimes called ``black hole spectroscopy.'' Third-generation Earth-based detectors and the space-based interferometer LISA could measure multiple spectral lines from different multipolar components of the radiation, and therefore provide qualitatively better tests of the Kerr hypothesis. In this paper we quantify the redshift out to which the various modes would be detectable (or, conversely, the number of detectable modes at any given redshift) as a function of the intrinsic parameters of the merging binary. LISA could detect so many modes that current numerical relativity simulations do not have enough resolution (or do not contain enough higher harmonics) to extract all available science from the data.