English

Computing spectral shifts for Johannsen-Psaltis Black Holes

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2026-05-27 v1

Abstract

The growing number of gravitational wave (GW) detections and the increasing sensitivity of GW detectors have enabled precision tests of General Relativity (GR) in the strong-field regime. The recent observation of multiple quasinormal modes (QNMs) in GW250114 marks a major advance for observational black hole spectroscopy. This clear signal, together with the growing number of GW detections, highlights the need for accurate predictions of QNM spectra in beyond-GR theories in order to carry out precision searches for new physics. In this work, we continue to lay the foundation for such predictions using a modified Teukolsky formalism in conjunction with the eigenvalue perturbation method. We compute the spectral shifts of slowly rotating Johannsen-Psaltis black holes for 2102 \leq \ell \leq 10, all mm, and overtones n=0,1,2n = 0, 1, 2, and confirm the large-\ell behavior of the modes by comparing with the WKB approximation. We find that these black holes admit definite-parity modes but break the isospectrality between even- and odd-parity QNMs at all spins, and that the shifts depend linearly on mm for slow spins. We further derive a general parity condition that any beyond-GR modification to the metric must satisfy to support definite-parity modes, providing new insights into isospectrality breaking and parity structure in gravitational perturbations.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2512.14679,
  title  = {Computing spectral shifts for Johannsen-Psaltis Black Holes},
  author = {David G. Wu and Asad Hussain and Aaron Zimmerman},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.14679},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

18 pages, 4 figures