Black hole spectroscopy: from theory to experiment
Abstract
The "ringdown" radiation emitted by oscillating black holes has great scientific potential. By carefully predicting the frequencies and amplitudes of black hole quasinormal modes and comparing them with gravitational-wave data from compact binary mergers we can advance our understanding of the two-body problem in general relativity, verify the predictions of the theory in the regime of strong and dynamical gravitational fields, and search for physics beyond the Standard Model or new gravitational degrees of freedom. We summarize the state of the art in our understanding of black hole quasinormal modes in general relativity and modified gravity, their excitation, and the modeling of ringdown waveforms. We also review the status of LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA ringdown observations, data analysis techniques, and the bright prospects of the field in the era of LISA and next-generation ground-based gravitational-wave detectors.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2505.23895,
title = {Black hole spectroscopy: from theory to experiment},
author = {Emanuele Berti and Vitor Cardoso and Gregorio Carullo and Jahed Abedi and Niayesh Afshordi and Simone Albanesi and Vishal Baibhav and Swetha Bhagwat and José Luis Blázquez-Salcedo and Béatrice Bonga and Bruno Bucciotti and Giada Caneva Santoro and Pablo A. Cano and Collin Capano and Mark Ho-Yeuk Cheung and Cecilia Chirenti and Gregory B. Cook and Adrian Ka-Wai Chung and Marina De Amicis and Kyriakos Destounis and Oscar J. C. Dias and Walter Del Pozzo and Francisco Duque and Will M. Farr and Eliot Finch and Nicola Franchini and Kwinten Fransen and Vasco Gennari and Stephen R. Green and Scott A. Hughes and Maximiliano Isi and Xisco Jimenez Forteza and Gaurav Khanna and Fech Scen Khoo and Masashi Kimura and Badri Krishnan and Adrien Kuntz and Macarena Lagos and Rico K. L. Lo and Lionel London and Sizheng Ma and Simon Maenaut and Lorena Magaña Zertuche and Elisa Maggio and Andrea Maselli and Keefe Mitman and Hayato Motohashi and Naritaka Oshita and Costantino Pacilio and Paolo Pani and Rodrigo Panosso Macedo and Chantal Pitte and Lorenzo Pompili and Jaime Redondo-Yuste and Maurício Richartz and Antonio Riotto and Jorge E. Santos and Bangalore Sathyaprakash and Laura Sberna and Hector O. Silva and Leo C. Stein and Alexandre Toubiana and Sebastian H. Völkel and Julian Westerweck and Huan Yang and Sophia Yi and Nicolas Yunes and Hengrui Zhu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.23895},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
320 pages, 80 figures; v2: incorporated comments, submitted to CQG