Perturbations of spinning black holes in dynamical Chern-Simons gravity: Slow rotation quasinormal modes

Abstract: Gravitational waves offer new ways to test general relativity (GR) in the strong-field regime, including tests involving the ringdown phase of binary black hole mergers, characterized by oscillating and quickly decaying quasinormal modes (QNMs). Recent advances have extended QNM calculations to several theories beyond GR through the development of the modified Teukolsky formalism, including higher derivative gravity and dynamical Chern-Simons (dCS) gravity. Using the modified Teukolsky formalism, we previously derived radial second-order differential equations governing curvature and scalar field perturbations in dCS gravity at leading order in spin. In this work, we compute the QNM frequency shifts for slowly rotating black holes in dCS gravity from these modified Teukolsky equations, and (1) show that the radial equations for Weyl scalars $\Psi_{0,4}$ can be separated into even- and odd-parity parts, confirming that the scalar field couples only to the odd-parity sector; (2) extend the eigenvalue perturbation method to coupled fields; (3) compute the QNM spectrum, obtaining consistent results across independent calculations using different radiation gauges; (4) calculate the overtones in the QNM spectra for the first time in dCS gravity; (5) show that our findings align with previous metric perturbation studies and mark the first QNM spectrum calculation in a non-minimally coupled scalar-tensor theory via the modified Teukolsky formalism. This work lays the foundation for studying fast-rotating black holes in dCS gravity, advancing black hole spectroscopy in beyond-GR contexts.