Quasinormal modes of rotating black holes in higher-derivative gravity

Abstract

We compute the spectrum of linearized gravitational excitations of black holes with substantial angular momentum in the presence of higher-derivative corrections to general relativity. We do so perturbatively to leading order in the higher-derivative couplings and up to order fourteen in the black hole angular momentum. This allows us to accurately predict quasinormal mode frequencies of black holes with spins up to about 70% of the extremal value. For some higher-derivative corrections, we find that sizable rotation enhances the frequency shifts by almost an order of magnitude relative to the static case.