English

Ringdown mode amplitudes of precessing binary black holes

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2026-01-05 v2 High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena

Abstract

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. Precession significantly impacts the ringdown excitation amplitudes and the related mode hierarchy. Using Gaussian process regression, we construct the first fits for the ringdown amplitudes of the most relevant modes in precessing systems.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2504.17021,
  title  = {Ringdown mode amplitudes of precessing binary black holes},
  author = {Francesco Nobili and Swetha Bhagwat and Costantino Pacilio and Davide Gerosa},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.17021},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

19 pages, 17 figures, 5 tables. Updated version after peer-reviewed publication

R2 v1 2026-06-28T23:09:01.768Z