No Arabic abstract
We consider a very simple model for gravitational wave echoes from black hole merger ringdowns which may arise from local Lorentz symmetry violations that modify graviton dispersion relations. If the corrections are sufficiently soft so they do not remove the horizon, the reflection of the infalling waves which trigger the echoes is very weak. As an example, we look at the dispersion relation of a test scalar field corrected by roton-like operators depending only on spatial momenta, in Gullstrand-Painleve coordinates. The near-horizon regions of a black hole do become reflective, but only very weakly. The resulting ``bounces of infalling waves can yield repetitive gravity wave emissions but their power is very small. This implies that to see any echoes from black holes we really need an egregious departure from either standard GR or effective field theory, or both. One possibility to realize such strong echoes is the recently proposed classical firewalls which replace black hole horizons with material shells surrounding timelike singularities.
We present the first numerical construction of the scalar Schwarzschild Green function in the time-domain, which reveals several universal features of wave propagation in black hole spacetimes. We demonstrate the trapping of energy near the photon sphere and confirm its exponential decay. The trapped wavefront propagates through caustics resulting in echoes that propagate to infinity. The arrival times and the decay rate of these caustic echoes are consistent with propagation along null geodesics and the large l-limit of quasinormal modes. We show that the four-fold singularity structure of the retarded Green function is due to the well-known action of a Hilbert transform on the trapped wavefront at caustics. A two-fold cycle is obtained for degenerate source-observer configurations along the caustic line, where the energy amplification increases with an inverse power of the scale of the source. Finally, we discuss the tail piece of the solution due to propagation within the light cone, up to and including null infinity, and argue that, even with ideal instruments, only a finite number of echoes can be observed. Putting these pieces together, we provide a heuristic expression that approximates the Green function with a few free parameters. Accurate calculations and approximations of the Green function are the most general way of solving for wave propagation in curved spacetimes and should be useful in a variety of studies such as the computation of the self-force on a particle.
Searches for gravitational wave echoes in the aftermath of mergers and/or formation of astrophysical black holes have recently opened a novel and surprising window into the quantum nature of their horizons. Similar to astro- and helioseismology, study of the spectrum of quantum black holes provides a promising method to understand their inner structure, what we call $textit{quantum black hole seismology}$. We provide a detailed numerical and analytic description of this spectrum in terms of the properties of the Kerr spacetime and quantum black hole horizons, showing that it drastically differs from their classical counterparts. Our most significant findings are the following: (1) If the temperature of quantum black hole is $lesssim 2 times$ Hawking temperature, then it will not suffer from ergoregion instability (although the bound is looser at smaller spins). (2) We find how quantum black hole spectra pinpoint the microscopic properties of quantum structure. For example, the detailed spacing of spectral lines can distinguish whether quantum effects appear through compactness (i.e., exotic compact objects) or frequency (i.e., modified dispersion relation). (3) We find out that the overtone quasinormal modes may strongly enhance the amplitude of echo in the low-frequency region. (4) We show the invariance of the spectrum under the generalized Darboux transformation of linear perturbations, showing that it is a genuine covariant observable.
Deep conceptual problems associated with classical black holes can be addressed in string theory by the fuzzball paradigm, which provides a microscopic description of a black hole in terms of a thermodynamically large number of regular, horizonless, geometries with much less symmetry than the corresponding black hole. Motivated by the tantalizing possibility to observe quantum gravity signatures near astrophysical compact objects in this scenario, we perform the first $3+1$ numerical simulations of a scalar field propagating on a large class of multicenter geometries with no spatial isometries arising from ${cal N}=2$ four-dimensional supergravity. We identify the prompt response to the perturbation and the ringdown modes associated with the photon sphere, which are similar to the black-hole case, and the appearence of echoes at later time, which is a smoking gun of the absence of a horizon and of the regular interior of these solutions. The response is in agreement with an analytical model based on geodesic motion in these complicated geometries. Our results provide the first numerical evidence for the dynamical linear stability of fuzzballs, and pave the way for an accurate discrimination between fuzzballs and black holes using gravitational-wave spectroscopy.
Gravitational wave echoes from the black holes have been suggested as a crucial observable to probe the spacetime in the vicinity of the horizon. In particular, it was speculated that the echoes are closely connected with specific characteristics of the exotic compact objects, and moreover, possibly provide an access to the quantum nature of gravity. Recently, it was shown that the discontinuity in the black hole metric substantially modifies the asymptotical behavior of quasinormal frequencies. In the present study, we proceed further and argue that a discontinuity planted into the metric furnishes an alternative mechanism for the black hole echoes. Physically, the latter may correspond to an uneven matter distribution inside the surrounding halo. To demonstrate the results, we first numerically investigate the temporal evolution of the scalar perturbations around a black hole that possesses a nonsmooth effective potential. It is shown that the phenomenon persists even though the discontinuity can be located further away from the horizon with rather insignificant strength. Besides, we show that the echoes in the present model can be derived analytically based on the modified pole structure of the associated Green function. The asymptotical properties of the quasinormal mode spectrum and the echoes are found to be closely connected, as both features can be attributed to the same origin. In particular, the period of the echoes in the time domain $T$ is shown to be related to the asymptotic spacing between successive poles along the real axis in the frequency domain $Delta(Reomega)$, by a simple relation $limlimits_{Reomegato+infty}Delta(Reomega) = 2pi/T$. Moreover, we discuss possible distinguishment between different echo mechanisms. The potential astrophysical implications of the present findings are also addressed.
It is known that the Meissner-like effect is seen in a magnetosphere without an electric current in black hole spacetime: no non-monopole component of magnetic flux penetrates the event horizon if the black hole is extreme. In this paper, in order to see how an electric current affects the Meissner-like effect, we study a force-free electromagnetic system in a static and spherically symmetric extreme black hole spacetime. By assuming that the rotational angular velocity of the magnetic field is very small, we construct a perturbative solution for the Grad-Shafranov equation, which is the basic equation to determine a stationary, axisymmetric electromagnetic field with a force-free electric current. Our perturbation analysis reveals that, if an electric current exists, higher multipole components may be superposed upon the monopole component on the event horizon, even if the black hole is extreme.