Prospects for true calorimetry on Kerr black holes in core-collapse supernovae and mergers

Observational evidence for black hole spin down has been found in the normalized light curves of long gamma-ray bursts in the BATSE catalog. Over the duration T-90 of the burst, matter swept up by the central black hole is susceptible to nonaxisymmetries, producing gravitational radiation with a negative chirp. A time-sliced matched filtering method is introduced to capture phase coherence on intermediate time scales, tau, here tested by the injection of templates into experimental strain noise, h(n)(t). For TAMA 300, h(n)(f) similar or equal to 10(-21) Hz(-1/2) at f 1 kHz gives a sensitivity distance for a reasonably accurate extraction of the trajectory in the time-frequency domain of about D similar or equal to 0.07-0.10 Mpc for the spin down of black holes of mass M = 10-12M(circle dot) with tau = 1 s. Extrapolation to advanced detectors implies D similar or equal to 35-50 Mpc for h(n)(f) similar or equal to 2 X 10(-24) Hz(-1/2) around 1 kHz, which will open a new window to rigorous calorimetry on Kerr black holes.