Black hole spectroscopy for precessing binary black hole coalescences

Abstract

The spectroscopic study of black hole quasinormal modes in gravitational-wave ringdown observations is hindered by our ignorance of which modes should dominate astrophysical signals for different binary configurations, limiting tests of general relativity and astrophysics. In this work, we present a description of the quasinormal modes that are excited in the ringdowns of comparable mass, quasicircular precessing binary black hole coalescences—a key region of parameter space that has yet to be fully explored within the framework of black hole spectroscopy. We suggest that the remnant perturbation for precessing and nonprecessing systems is approximately the same up to a rotation, which implies that the relative amplitudes of the quasinormal modes in both systems are also related by a rotation. We present evidence for this by analyzing an extensive catalog of numerical relativity simulations. Additional structure in the amplitudes is connected to the system’s kick velocity and other asymmetries in the orbital dynamics. We find that the ringdowns of precessing systems need not be dominated by the (ℓ,𝑚,𝑛)=(2,±2,0) quasinormal modes, and that instead the (2,±1,0) or (2, 0,0) quasinormal modes can dominate. Our results are consistent with a ringdown analysis of the LIGO-Virgo gravitational wave signal GW190521, and may also help in understanding phenomenological inspiral-merger-ringdown waveform model systematics.

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