Greybody factors imprinted on black hole ringdowns: An alternative to superposed quasinormal modes

Abstract

It is shown that the spectral amplitude of gravitational wave ringdown of a Kerr black hole sourced by an extreme mass ratio merger can be modeled by the greybody factor, which quantifies the scattering nature of the black hole geometry. The estimation of the mass and spin of the remnant is demonstrated by fitting the greybody factor to gravitational wave data without using black hole quasinormal modes. We propose that the ringdown modeling with the greybody factor may strengthen the test of gravity as one can avoid the possible overfitting issue and the start time problem in the ringdown modeling with superposed quasinormal modes.