Ringing Out General Relativity: Quasinormal Mode Frequencies for Black Holes of Any Spin in Modified Gravity

Abstract

After black holes collide, the remnant settles to a stationary state by emitting gravitational waves. Once nonlinearities subside, these ringdown waves are dominated by exponentially damped sinusoids, or quasinormal modes. We develop a general method using perturbative spectral expansions to calculate the quasinormal-mode frequencies and damping times in a wide class of modified gravity theories for black holes with any subextremal spin. We apply this method to scalar-Gauss-Bonnet gravity to show its accuracy, thus enabling robust ringdown tests with gravitational wave data.