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Quasinormal-mode spectrum of Kerr black holes and its geometric interpretation

8 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.

8 Pith papers citing it
abstract

There is a well-known, intuitive geometric correspondence between high-frequency QNMs of Schwarzschild black holes and null geodesics that reside on the light-ring : the real part of the mode's frequency relates to the geodesic's orbital frequency, and the imaginary part of the frequency corresponds to the Lyapunov exponent of the orbit. For slowly rotating black holes, the QNM real frequency is a linear combination of a the orbit's precessional and orbital frequencies, but the correspondence is otherwise unchanged. In this paper, we find a relationship between the QNM frequencies of Kerr black holes of arbitrary (astrophysical) spins and general spherical photon orbits, which is analogous to the relationship for slowly rotating holes. To derive this result, we first use the WKB approximation to compute accurate algebraic expressions for large-l QNM frequencies. Comparing our WKB calculation to the leading-order, geometric-optics approximation to scalar-wave propagation in the Kerr spacetime, we then draw a correspondence between the real parts of the parameters of a QNM and the conserved quantities of spherical photon orbits. At next-to-leading order in this comparison, we relate the imaginary parts of the QNM parameters to coefficients that modify the amplitude of the scalar wave. With this correspondence, we find a geometric interpretation to two features of the QNM spectrum of Kerr black holes: First, for Kerr holes rotating near the maximal rate, a large number of modes have nearly zero damping; we connect this characteristic to the fact that a large number of spherical photon orbits approach the horizon in this limit. Second, for black holes of any spins, the frequencies of specific sets of modes are degenerate; we find that this feature arises when the spherical photon orbits corresponding to these modes form closed (as opposed to ergodically winding) curves.

citation-role summary

background 2 method 1

citation-polarity summary

fields

gr-qc 8

years

2026 5 2025 3

representative citing papers

Physics informed operator learning of parameter dependent spectra

gr-qc · 2026-04-26 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

DeepOPiraKAN learns parameter-to-spectrum mappings via operator learning and achieves relative errors of O(10^{-6}) to O(10^{-4}) for Kerr black hole quasinormal modes up to n=7 when benchmarked against Leaver's method.

Kerr Black Hole Ringdown in Effective Field Theory

gr-qc · 2026-03-10 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

Effective field theory yields model-independent corrections to Kerr black hole quasinormal modes that oscillate logarithmically near extremality, indicating discrete scale invariance.

Quasinormal mode/grey-body factor correspondence for Kerr black holes

gr-qc · 2025-12-29 · conditional · novelty 5.0

WKB analysis of the Teukolsky equation establishes a quasinormal-mode to greybody-factor correspondence for Kerr black holes that holds in the eikonal limit for gravitational perturbations and matches numerics at high angular momentum.

Black hole spectroscopy: from theory to experiment

gr-qc · 2025-05-29 · unverdicted · novelty 2.0

A review summarizing the state of the art in black hole quasinormal modes, ringdown waveform modeling, current LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA observations, and prospects for LISA and next-generation detectors.

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