Analytical model for gravitational-wave echoes from spinning remnants

Abstract

Gravitational-wave echoes in the postmerger signal of a binary coalescence are predicted in various scenarios, including near-horizon quantum structures, exotic states of matter in ultracompact stars, and certain deviations from general relativity. The amplitude and frequency of each echo is modulated by the photon-sphere barrier of the remnant, which acts as a spin- and frequency-dependent high-pass filter, decreasing the frequency content of each subsequent echo. Furthermore, a major fraction of the energy of the echo signal is contained in low-frequency resonances corresponding to the quasinormal modes of the remnant. Motivated by these features, in this work we provide an analytical gravitational-wave template in the low-frequency approximation describing the postmerger ringdown and the echo signal of a spinning ultracompact object. Besides the standard ringdown parameters, the template is parametrized in terms of only two physical quantities: the reflectivity coefficient and the compactness of the remnant. We discuss novel effects related to the spin and to the complex reflectivity, such as a more involved modulation of subsequent echoes, the mixing of two polarizations, and the ergoregion instability in the case of perfectly reflecting spinning remnants. Finally, we compute the errors in the estimation of the template parameters with current and future gravitational-wave detectors using a Fisher matrix framework. Our analysis suggests that models with almost perfect reflectivity can be excluded/detected with current instruments, whereas probing values of the reflectivity smaller than 80% at the 3σ confidence level requires future detectors (Einstein Telescope, Cosmic Explorer, LISA). The template developed in this work can easily be implemented to perform a matched-filter based search for echoes and to constrain models of exotic compact objects.