GW241011 data shows consistency with Kerr black holes for both quadrupole and octupole moments and delivers the first observational bounds on spin-induced octupole deviations.
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Black Hole Spectroscopy and Tests of General Relativity with GW250114
Canonical reference. 79% of citing Pith papers cite this work as background.
abstract
The binary black hole signal GW250114, the loudest gravitational wave detected to date, offers a unique opportunity to test Einstein's general relativity (GR) in the high-velocity, strong-gravity regime and probe whether the remnant conforms to the Kerr metric. Upon perturbation, black holes emit a spectrum of damped sinusoids with specific, complex frequencies. Our analysis of the post-merger signal shows that at least two quasi-normal modes are required to explain the data, with the most damped remaining statistically significant for about one cycle. We probe the remnant's Kerr nature by constraining the spectroscopic pattern of the dominant quadrupolar ($\ell = m = 2$) mode and its first overtone to match the Kerr prediction to tens of percent at multiple post-peak times. The measured mode amplitudes and phases agree with a numerical-relativity simulation having parameters close to GW250114. By fitting a parameterized waveform that incorporates the full inspiral-merger-ringdown sequence, we constrain the fundamental $(\ell=m=4)$ mode to tens of percent and bound the quadrupolar frequency to within a few percent of the GR prediction. We perform a suite of tests -- spanning inspiral, merger, and ringdown -- finding constraints that are comparable to, and in some cases 2-3 times more stringent than those obtained by combining dozens of events in the fourth Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog. These results constitute the most stringent single-event verification of GR and the Kerr nature of black holes to date, and outline the power of black-hole spectroscopy for future gravitational-wave observations.
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representative citing papers
Direct waves in filtered Schwarzschild ringdown are the anti-causal filter-pole contribution sourced by near-horizon trajectory dynamics and do not vanish.
All gravitational-wave binaries analyzed through O4a are consistent with zero line-of-sight acceleration, measured with a new time-domain Doppler method applicable to any waveform model.
Bayesian analysis of GW230627 and GW250114 finds no deviation from GR at 4PN and 4.5PN orders, setting the first empirical baseline with 90% intervals of order O(1)-O(10).
A gravitational-wave method infers the Kerr-equivalent horizon area from direct waves in the near-merger signal of GW250114, yielding consistency with the Kerr remnant and a new test of Hawking's area law.
Quasinormal mode excitation in black hole ringdown equals the Fourier transform of the perturbation evaluated at the mode frequency, so black holes act as resonant spectral filters.
A bouncing singularity from a null geodesic sets the convergence of the QNM expansion for the Schwarzschild retarded Green's function.
Natural polynomials for Schwarzschild and Kerr quasinormal modes are Pollaczek-Jacobi polynomials with complex parameters, with recurrence peaking at the physical overtone index for Schwarzschild.
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.
No three-body encounter signatures detected in GW170817, GW190814, and GW230627_015337, constraining intermediate-mass black holes above 100 solar masses within roughly 0.1 AU of these binaries.
GreyRing model based on greybody factors reproduces numerical relativity ringdown signals with mismatches of order 10^{-6} and enables a new post-merger consistency test of general relativity applied to GW250114.
Leading-order deviations from general relativity in scalar quasinormal modes of rotating black holes are computed numerically up to dimensionless spins of 0.99 in quadratic-curvature scalar-tensor theories.
Presents a practical fully time-domain end-to-end likelihood for gravitational-wave inference with structured linear algebra and GPU acceleration.
Ratio-Filter Dechirping converts gravitational-wave matched filtering from a memory-bound FFT into a cache-efficient FIR convolution, delivering a measured 8x speedup in the core loop.
A four-parameter greybody factor model reproduces the frequency-domain ringdown amplitude of comparable-mass aligned-spin mergers with mismatches of order 10^{-5}, improving existing models by two orders of magnitude.
No GWTC-3 event robustly prefers a non-BBH merger morphology once low-frequency cutoffs are raised; apparent low-compactness modes are noise artifacts, with GW231123 left as an unresolved special case.
Numerical relativity in the decoupling limit reveals dynamical scalarization and spin-induced (de)scalarization during hyperbolic black hole encounters for both signs of the coupling.
Extends relativistic EMRI calculations in scalar clouds from circular-equatorial to eccentric and inclined orbits around Schwarzschild black holes, revealing apsidal-precession resonances and inclination-dependent net energy transfer.
SPRING framework propagates pre-merger information into spectral-level ringdown inference, improving Bayesian support for an agnostic two-damped-sinusoid model on GW250114 by ΔlnB ~5-10 while keeping remnant posteriors consistent with IMR estimates.
Bayesian analysis finds individual QNM frequencies near avoided crossings hard to resolve even under optimistic conditions, though collective AC waveform signatures may remain detectable if those modes dominate and slower-mode contamination is minimal.
An EFT consistency map transports cosmology-conditioned posteriors from scalar-tensor FLRW backgrounds to black-hole quasinormal-mode kernels, showing tensor-speed effects fall below ringdown detectability while other operators remain potentially active near black holes.
FIREFLY algorithm enables 200-fold faster multi-mode ringdown analysis for space-borne gravitational wave detectors while remaining compatible with time-delay interferometry.
Leading-order cubic-curvature corrections to scalar quasinormal modes of black holes with spins up to 0.99M are computed numerically for modes up to l=5 with relative errors below 10^{-4}.
GW250114 data constrains GR deviations in merger amplitude to 10% and frequency to 4% at 90% CL, with first bounds on the (4,4) mode frequency at 6%.
citing papers explorer
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Testing the Kerr hypothesis beyond the quadrupole with GW241011
GW241011 data shows consistency with Kerr black holes for both quadrupole and octupole moments and delivers the first observational bounds on spin-induced octupole deviations.
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Foundations of Direct Waves in Schwarzschild Ringdown
Direct waves in filtered Schwarzschild ringdown are the anti-causal filter-pole contribution sourced by near-horizon trajectory dynamics and do not vanish.
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Constraints on Line-of-Sight Acceleration from O1-O4
All gravitational-wave binaries analyzed through O4a are consistent with zero line-of-sight acceleration, measured with a new time-domain Doppler method applicable to any waveform model.
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Tests of general relativity at the fourth post-Newtonian order with GW230627 and GW250114
Bayesian analysis of GW230627 and GW250114 finds no deviation from GR at 4PN and 4.5PN orders, setting the first empirical baseline with 90% intervals of order O(1)-O(10).
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Measuring a Black Hole's Area Immediately after Merger: A Direct-Wave Test of Hawking's Area Law
A gravitational-wave method infers the Kerr-equivalent horizon area from direct waves in the near-merger signal of GW250114, yielding consistency with the Kerr remnant and a new test of Hawking's area law.
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Shaping black hole resonances I. Black hole ringdown as a spectral filtering process
Quasinormal mode excitation in black hole ringdown equals the Fourier transform of the perturbation evaluated at the mode frequency, so black holes act as resonant spectral filters.
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Bouncing singularities in Schwarzschild: a geometric origin of the QNM convergence region
A bouncing singularity from a null geodesic sets the convergence of the QNM expansion for the Schwarzschild retarded Green's function.
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Properties of natural polynomials for Schwarzschild and Kerr black holes
Natural polynomials for Schwarzschild and Kerr quasinormal modes are Pollaczek-Jacobi polynomials with complex parameters, with recurrence peaking at the physical overtone index for Schwarzschild.
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Physics informed operator learning of parameter dependent spectra
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.
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How lonely are the Binary Compact Objects Detected by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration?
No three-body encounter signatures detected in GW170817, GW190814, and GW230627_015337, constraining intermediate-mass black holes above 100 solar masses within roughly 0.1 AU of these binaries.
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Novel ringdown tests of general relativity with black hole greybody factors
GreyRing model based on greybody factors reproduces numerical relativity ringdown signals with mismatches of order 10^{-6} and enables a new post-merger consistency test of general relativity applied to GW250114.
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Quadratic gravity corrections to scalar QNMs of rapidly rotating black holes
Leading-order deviations from general relativity in scalar quasinormal modes of rotating black holes are computed numerically up to dimensionless spins of 0.99 in quadratic-curvature scalar-tensor theories.
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Accelerated Time-domain Analysis for Gravitational Wave Astronomy
Presents a practical fully time-domain end-to-end likelihood for gravitational-wave inference with structured linear algebra and GPU acceleration.
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Beyond FINDCHIRP: Breaking the memory wall and optimal FFTs for Gravitational-Wave Matched-Filter Searches with Ratio-Filter Dechirping
Ratio-Filter Dechirping converts gravitational-wave matched filtering from a memory-bound FFT into a cache-efficient FIR convolution, delivering a measured 8x speedup in the core loop.
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Modeling the frequency-domain ringdown amplitude of comparable-mass mergers with greybody factors
A four-parameter greybody factor model reproduces the frequency-domain ringdown amplitude of comparable-mass aligned-spin mergers with mismatches of order 10^{-5}, improving existing models by two orders of magnitude.
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Compactness Inference in Gravitational-Wave Mergers with PhenomDECO: Catalog Benchmarks and Robustness Diagnostics
No GWTC-3 event robustly prefers a non-BBH merger morphology once low-frequency cutoffs are raised; apparent low-compactness modes are noise artifacts, with GW231123 left as an unresolved special case.
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Scalarization and descalarization in hyperbolic encounters of black holes
Numerical relativity in the decoupling limit reveals dynamical scalarization and spin-induced (de)scalarization during hyperbolic black hole encounters for both signs of the coupling.
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Relativistic effects in extreme-mass-ratio inspirals within scalar clouds: Eccentric and inclined orbits
Extends relativistic EMRI calculations in scalar clouds from circular-equatorial to eccentric and inclined orbits around Schwarzschild black holes, revealing apsidal-precession resonances and inclination-dependent net energy transfer.
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A pre-merger-informed spectral-level ringdown inference framework for black-hole spectroscopy
SPRING framework propagates pre-merger information into spectral-level ringdown inference, improving Bayesian support for an agnostic two-damped-sinusoid model on GW250114 by ΔlnB ~5-10 while keeping remnant posteriors consistent with IMR estimates.
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Detectability of avoided crossings in black hole ringdowns
Bayesian analysis finds individual QNM frequencies near avoided crossings hard to resolve even under optimistic conditions, though collective AC waveform signatures may remain detectable if those modes dominate and slower-mode contamination is minimal.
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A cosmology-to-ringdown EFT consistency map for scalar-tensor gravity
An EFT consistency map transports cosmology-conditioned posteriors from scalar-tensor FLRW backgrounds to black-hole quasinormal-mode kernels, showing tensor-speed effects fall below ringdown detectability while other operators remain potentially active near black holes.
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Cracking Gravitational Wave Multiple Ringdown Modes in Space
FIREFLY algorithm enables 200-fold faster multi-mode ringdown analysis for space-borne gravitational wave detectors while remaining compatible with time-delay interferometry.
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Ringing of rapidly rotating black holes in effective field theory
Leading-order cubic-curvature corrections to scalar quasinormal modes of black holes with spins up to 0.99M are computed numerically for modes up to l=5 with relative errors below 10^{-4}.
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Plunge-Merger-Ringdown Tests of General Relativity with GW250114
GW250114 data constrains GR deviations in merger amplitude to 10% and frequency to 4% at 90% CL, with first bounds on the (4,4) mode frequency at 6%.
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Quasinormal modes of rotating black holes beyond general relativity in the WKB approximation
Higher-order WKB accurately computes quasinormal mode frequencies for rotating black holes beyond general relativity, with errors below current GW measurement precision for GW250114.
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Learning Post-Newtonian Corrections from Numerical Relativity
A PINN learns higher-order corrections to the TaylorT4 PN model from eight NR surrogate waveforms, reducing phase and amplitude errors in the inspiral while enforcing physical symmetries.
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Excitation factors for horizonless compact objects: long-lived modes, echoes, and greybody factors
Excitation factors of long-lived quasinormal modes in horizonless compact objects scale with their small imaginary frequency, suppressing early contributions and producing a hierarchy where prompt ringdown uses ordinary modes and late echoes use cavity modes.
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Extended parameterized spin expansion formalism for ringdown analysis with GW250114
Simultaneously sampling the EFT scaling index p̃ and length scale ℓ̃ in ParSpec shows p̃ is prior-dominated and the ℓ̃ ~ 83 km bound is mostly prior geometry.
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Impact of the Einstein Telescope's duty cycle on the estimation of binary black holes parameters
ET-Δ outperforms ET-2L on luminosity distance and source-frame masses for BBH events because its redundancy produces higher multi-detector uptime under realistic duty-cycle modeling.
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Radio Emission from High-Frequency Gravitational Wave Point Sources
Radio telescopes outperform other experiments at detecting high-frequency gravitational waves from primordial black hole mergers and boson clouds through conversion to radio signals in magnetic fields.
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Constraining Gravitational Wave Memory with Hierarchical Inference
Hierarchical Bayesian inference on GWTC-5.0 constrains the memory enhancement factor to 0.26 with large uncertainties consistent with the GR value of 1 and forecasts that 2000 detections are needed for a 1σ constraint away from zero.
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Nucleosynthesis in the fast ejecta of a neutron star merger
Free neutrons survive r-process freeze-out in fast ejecta of neutron star mergers and their beta-decay heating produces a visible early kilonova precursor for mass fractions above ~0.05.
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Ringdown Analysis of GW250114 with Orthonormal Modes
Orthonormal QNM analysis of GW250114 raises the significance of the first overtone of the ℓ=m=2 mode from 82.5% to 99.9% and detects no significant deviation from Kerr predictions.
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Spectroscopy of analogue black holes using simulation-based inference
Simulation-based inference reliably extracts physical parameters from noisy spectra of analogue black holes.
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Energy-momentum and dark energy in $\boldsymbol{SU(\infty)}$-QGR quantum gravity
Invariance of the SU(∞)-QGR action under variation of the parameter-space metric produces an Einstein-like energy-momentum constraint, and Hilbert-space fragmentation is argued to classically appear as inflation, reheating, and late-time acceleration.
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Probing Kerr Symmetry Breaking with LISA Extreme-Mass-Ratio Inspirals
LISA EMRIs can constrain deviations from Kerr equatorial symmetry to 10^{-2} and axial symmetry to 10^{-3} using Analytic Kludge waveforms and Fisher analysis.
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Are Black Holes Fuzzballs? Probing Horizon-Scale Structure with LISA
LISA can constrain non-axisymmetric mass quadrupole deformations at the 10^{-3} level and axisymmetric mass octupole deformations at the 10^{-2} level in EMRI signals to test fuzzball proposals.
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Confronting eikonal and post-Kerr methods with numerical evolution of scalar field perturbations in spacetimes beyond Kerr
Numerical simulations benchmark the eikonal and post-Kerr approximations for quasinormal modes in deformed Kerr spacetimes, quantifying their errors relative to expected observational precision.
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Leading effective field theory corrections to the Kerr metric at all spins
Numerical solutions show that leading effective-field-theory corrections to the Kerr metric grow with spin and are largest near extremality.
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Two-scalar-field $f(R)$ Thick Branes, Gravitational Resonances and Quasinormal Modes
In ghost-free two-scalar f(R) thick branes, internal structure produces no narrow real-axis tensor resonances; quasinormal modes are broad with quality factors 0.9-1.9.
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Nonlinear Stability of Kerr-Sen Black Holes in Merging Binaries
Head-on binary black hole simulations in EMDA theory show dilaton and axion fields persist through merger, indicating nonlinear stability of Kerr-Sen black holes and scalarization of initially unscalarized solutions.
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Mitigating Systematic Errors in Parameter Estimation of Binary Black Hole Mergers in O1-O3 LIGO-Virgo Data
Reanalysis of flagged LVK events with waveform uncertainty models produces consistent spin and precession inferences across raw/deglitched data and multiple waveform approximants.
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GW190711_030756 and GW200114_020818: astrophysical interpretation of two asymmetric binary black hole mergers in the IAS catalog
Two asymmetric BBH mergers are characterized with mass ratios 0.35 and ≤0.20; one shows high spins, negative χ_eff, and strong precession, suggesting an emerging population of massive rapidly spinning systems.
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Accelerating parameter estimation for parameterized tests of general relativity with gravitational-wave observations
Relative binning accelerates TIGER parameterized GR tests by factors of 10-100 while recovering unbiased posteriors on simulated signals and real events like GW150914.
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On the impossibility of observational confirmation of black holes
No observational data can confirm the existence of black holes because general relativity imposes fundamental limits on what can be established about them.
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