Gravity Seminar: Black hole perturbations and phase-amplitude methods, Hector Okada da Silva, AEI Potsdam, Germany

The inference of quasinormal modes frequencies from the ringdown part of gravitational-wave signals produced by the coalescence of black hole binaries can be used to infer the mass and spin of the remnant black hole and, possibly, test general relativity and its competing theories in the strong-field regime. For this to happen, accurate predictions for the quasinormal modes are necessary. I will (i) recap why calculating quasinormal modes is technically challenging, (ii) review an elegant phase-amplitude approach to overcome these challenges and then (iii) present some results and share some thoughts about what quasinormal modes tell us about high-curvature corrections to general relativity.