Black hole greybody factors from Korteweg–de Vries integrals: Computation

Abstract

It has recently been shown that the dynamics of perturbed nonrotating black holes (BHs) admits an infinite number of symmetries that are generated by the flow of the Korteweg-de Vries (KdV) equation. These symmetries lead to an infinite number of conserved quantities that can be obtained as integrals of differential polynomials in the potential appearing in the gauge-invariant master equations describing the BH perturbations, the KdV integrals. These conserved quantities are the same for all the possible potentials, which means that they are invariant under Darboux transformations, and they fully determine the BHs transmission amplitudes, or greybody factors, via a moment problem. In this paper we introduce a new semianalytical method to obtain the greybody factors associated with BH scattering processes by solving the moment problem using only the KdV integrals. The method is based on the use of Pad\'e approximants and we check it first by comparing with results from the case of a P\"oschl-Teller potential, for which we have analytical expressions for the greybody factors. Then, we apply it to the case of a Schwarzschild BH and compare with results from computations based on the Wentzel--Kramers--Brillouin (WKB) approximation. It turns out that the new method provides accurate results for the BH greybody factors for all frequencies. The method is also computationally very efficient.