Tidal response and near-horizon boundary conditions for spinning exotic compact objects

Abstract

Teukolsky equations for $|s|=2$ provide efficient ways to solve for curvature perturbations around Kerr black holes. Imposing regularity conditions on these perturbations on the future (past) horizon corresponds to imposing an in-going (out-going) wave boundary condition. For exotic compact objects (ECOs) with external Kerr spacetime, however, it is not yet clear how to physically impose boundary conditions for curvature perturbations on their boundaries. We address this problem using the Membrane Paradigm, by considering a family of fiducial observers (FIDOs) that float right above the horizon of a linearly perturbed Kerr black hole. From the reference frame of these observers, the ECO will experience tidal perturbations due to in-going gravitational waves, respond to these waves, and generate out-going waves. As it also turns out, if both in-going and out-going waves exist near the horizon, the Newman Penrose (NP) quantity $ψ_0$ will be numerically dominated by the in-going wave, while the NP quantity $ψ_4$ will be dominated by the out-going wave. In this way, we obtain the ECO boundary condition in the form of a relation between $ψ_0$ and the complex conjugate of $ψ_4$, in a way that is determined by the ECO's tidal response in the FIDO frame. We explore several ways to modify gravitational-wave dispersion in the FIDO frame, and deduce the corresponding ECO boundary condition for Teukolsky functions. We subsequently obtain the boundary condition for $ψ_4$ alone, as well as for the Sasaki-Nakamura and Detweiler's functions. As it also turns out, reflection of spinning ECOs will generically mix between different $\ell$ components of the perturbations fields, and be different for perturbations with different parities. We also apply our boundary condition to computing gravitational-wave echoes from spinning ECOs, and solve for the spinning ECOs' quasi-normal modes.