Abstract
We investigate the propagation of gravitational waves on a black hole background within the low-energy effective field theory of gravity, where effects from heavy fields are captured by higher-dimensional curvature operators. Depending on the spin of the particles integrated out, the speed of gravitational waves at low energy can be either superluminal or subluminal as compared to the causal structure observed by other species. Interestingly, however, gravitational waves are always exactly luminal at the black hole horizon, implying that the horizon is identically defined for all species. We further compute the corrections on quasinormal frequencies caused by the higher-dimensional curvature operators and highlight the corrections arising from the low-energy effective field.
Highlights
The detection of gravitational waves (GWs) opens up a brand new window of opportunity to test gravity
We investigate the propagation of gravitational waves on a black hole background within the low-energy effective field theory of gravity, where effects from heavy fields are captured by higher-dimensional curvature operators
It is known that the speed of GWs could be different from the speed of photons due to interactions with other fields which may manifest themselves as irrelevant operators in the low-energy effective field theory (EFT) of gravity
Summary
The detection of gravitational waves (GWs) opens up a brand new window of opportunity to test gravity. Since the speed of various species is not invariant under a change of frames, we qualify our statement and make the impact on the causal structure manifest by working in the Jordan frame, where all the matter fields (including light) are minimally coupled to gravity, ensuring that electromagnetic waves travel at a luminal speed with respect to the background metric In this frame, we consider the low-energy EFT of gravity by including the local and covariant higher-order curvature operators present in the low-energy EFT. II, we introduce the low-energy EFT of gravity, including the dimension-six operators We study their perturbative effects on the black hole solution and derive the modified ReggeWheeler-Zerilli equations for the metric perturbations.
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