Speaker
Description
Quasinormal modes (QNMs) are the exponentially damped, oscillatory solutions to linearized wave equations that appear in a variety of physical contexts. Most notably, the gravitational waves emitted during the ringdown phase of the merger of two compact objects, such as neutron stars or black holes, are characterized by QNMs. The frequencies of the QNMs encode information about the relic object such as mass and spin, and -- in the most energetic cases -- are sensitive to higher-curvature corrections to general relativity. The stability of a QNM depends on how its frequency changes in response to perturbations; the pseudospectrum allows us to examine the stability of all the QNMs to a specific perturbation of the background. In this talk, I will review how the pseudospectrum is used to examine the stability of the QNMs of Schwarzschild and Kerr black holes. I will then discuss how these methods can be applied to the stability of QNMs for classical soliton solutions.
