High precision ringdown modeling: Multimode fits and BMS frames

Abstract

Quasinormal mode (QNM) modeling is an invaluable tool for characterizing remnant black holes, studying strong gravity, and testing general relativity. Only recently have QNM studies begun to focus on multimode fitting to numerical relativity strain waveforms. As gravitational wave observatories become even more sensitive they will be able to resolve higher-order modes. Consequently, multimode QNM fits will be critically important, and in turn require a more thorough treatment of the asymptotic frame at I⁺. The first main result of this work is a method for systematically fitting a QNM model containing many modes to a numerical waveform produced using Cauchy-characteristic extraction (CCE), a waveform extraction technique which is known to resolve memory effects. We choose the modes to model based on their power contribution to the residual between numerical and model waveforms. We show that the all-mode strain mismatch improves by a factor of ∼10⁵ when using multimode fitting as opposed to only fitting the (2, ±2, n) modes. Our most significant result addresses a critical point that has been overlooked in the QNM literature: the importance of matching the Bondi-van der Burg-Metzner-Sachs (BMS) frame of the numerical waveform to that of the QNM model. We show that by mapping the numerical waveforms—which exhibit the memory effect—to a BMS frame known as the super rest frame, there is an improvement of ∼10⁵ in the all-mode strain mismatch compared to using a strain waveform whose BMS frame is not fixed. Furthermore, we find that by mapping CCE waveforms to the super rest frame, we can obtain all-mode mismatches that are, on average, a factor of ∼4 better than using the publicly available extrapolated waveforms. We illustrate the effectiveness of these modeling enhancements by applying them to families of waveforms produced by numerical relativity and comparing our results to previous QNM studies.