Tidal response and near-horizon boundary conditions for spinning exotic compact objects

Abstract

Teukolsky equations for |s| = 2 provide efficient ways to solve for curvature perturbations around Kerr black holes. Imposing regularity conditions on these perturbations on the future (past) horizon corresponds to imposing an ingoing (outgoing) wave boundary condition. For exotic compact objects (ECOs) with external Kerr spacetime, however, it is not yet clear how to physically impose boundary conditions for curvature perturbations on their boundaries. We address this problem using the membrane paradigm, by considering a family of zero-angular-momentum fiducial observers (FIDOs) that float right above the horizon of a linearly perturbed Kerr black hole. From the reference frame of these observers, the ECO will experience tidal perturbations due to ingoing gravitational waves, respond to these waves, and generate outgoing waves. As it also turns out, if both ingoing and outgoing waves exist near the horizon, the Newman-Penrose (NP) quantity ψ₀ will be numerically dominated by the ingoing wave, while the NP quantity ψ₄ will be dominated by the outgoing wave—even though both quantities contain full information regarding the wave field. In this way, we obtain the ECO boundary condition in the form of a relation between ψ₀ and the complex conjugate of ψ₄, in a way that is determined by the ECO’s tidal response in the FIDO frame. We explore several ways to modify gravitational-wave dispersion in the FIDO frame and deduce the corresponding ECO boundary condition for Teukolsky functions. Using the Starobinsky-Teukolsky identity, we subsequently obtain the boundary condition for ψ₄ alone, as well as for the Sasaki-Nakamura and Detweiler functions. As it also turns out, the reflection of spinning ECOs will generically mix between different ℓ components of the perturbation fields, and it will be different for perturbations with different parities. It is straightforward to apply our boundary condition to computing gravitational-wave echoes from spinning ECOs, and to solve for the spinning ECOs’ quasinormal modes.