Gravitational wave signatures of black hole quasi-normal mode instability

Abstract: Black hole (BH) spectroscopy has emerged as a powerful approach to extract spacetime information from gravitational wave (GW) observed signals. Yet, quasinormal mode (QNM) spectral instability under high wave-number perturbations has been recently shown to be a common classical general relativistic phenomenon [1]. This requires to assess its impact on the BH QNM spectrum, in particular on BH QNM overtone frequencies. We conclude: i) perturbed BH QNM overtones are indeed potentially observable in the GW waveform, providing information on small-scale environment BH physics, and ii) their detection poses a challenging data analysis problem of singular interest for LISA astrophysics. We adopt a two-fold approach, combining theoretical results from scattering theory with a fine-tuned data analysis on a highly-accurate numerical GW ringdown signal. The former introduces a set of effective parameters (partially lying on a BH Weyl law) to characterise QNM instability physics. The latter provides a proof-of-principle demonstrating that the QNM spectral instability is indeed accessible in the time-domain GW waveform, though certainly requiring large signal-to-noise ratios. Particular attention is devoted to discuss the patterns of isospectrality loss under QNM instability, since the disentanglement between axial and polar GW parities may already occur within the near-future detection range.