An Improved Search Method for Gravitational Ringing of Black Holes

Abstract

A black hole has characteristic quasi-normal modes that will be excited when it is formed or when the geometry is perturbed. The state of a black hole when the quasi-normal modes are excited is called the gravitational ringing, and detections of it will be a direct confirmation of the existence of black holes. To detect it, a method based on matched filtering needs to be developed. Generically, matched filtering requires a large number of templates, because one has to ensure a proper match of a real gravitational wave with one of template waveforms to keep the detection efficiency as high as possible. On the other hand, the number of templates must be kept as small as possible under limited computational costs. In our previous paper, assuming that the gravitational ringing is dominated by the least-damped (fundamental) mode with the least imaginary part of frequency, we constructed an efficient method for tiling the template space. However, the dependence of the template space metric on the initial phase of a wave was not taken into account. This dependence arises because of an unavoidable mismatch between the parameters of a signal waveform and those given discretely in the template space. In this paper, we properly take this dependence into account and present an improved, efficient search method for gravitational ringing of black holes.