Analytical computation of quasinormal modes of slowly rotating black holes in dynamical Chern-Simons gravity

Using gravitational wave observations to search for deviations from general relativity (GR) in the stronggravity regime has become an important research direction. One aspect of the strong gravity modifications to GR is parity violation. Chern Simons (CS) gravity is one of the most frequently studied parity-violating models of strong gravity. CS gravity is indistinguishable from GR for all conformally flat space-times and for space-times that possess a maximally symmetric two-dimensional subspace. Also, it is known that the Kerr black hole is not a solution for CS gravity. At the same time, the only rotating solution available in the literature for dynamical CS (DCS) gravity is the slow-rotating case most accurately known to quadratic order in spin. In this work, for the slow-rotating case (accurate to first order in spin), we derive the linear perturbation equations governing the metric and the DCS field accurate to linear order in spin and quadratic order in the CS coupling parameter (a) and obtain the quasinormal mode (QNM) frequencies. After confirming the recent results of Wagle et al. arXiv:2103.09913, we find an additional contribution to the eigenfrequency correction at the leading perturbative order of a(2). Unlike Wagle et al., we also find corrections to frequencies in the polar sector. We compute these extra corrections by evaluating the expectation values of the perturbative potential on unperturbed QNM wave functions along a contour deformed into the complex-r plane. For a = 0.1M(2), we obtain the ratio of the imaginary parts of the DCS correction to the GR correction in the first QNM frequency (in the polar sector) to be 0.263 implying significant change. For the (2, 2) mode, the DCS corrections make imaginary part of the first QNM of the fundamental mode less negative, thereby decreasing the decay rate. Our results, along with future gravitational wave observations, can be used as a test for DCS gravity and to further constrain the CS coupling parameters.

Automated summary

Using gravitational wave observations to search for deviations from general relativity in the strong gravity regime is an important research direction. The study suggests that Chern-Simons gravity is a common parity-violating model that is difficult to distinguish from GR under certain spacetime conditions.