Fredholm approach to characterize gravitational wave echoes

Abstract

Gravitational waves are a sensitive probe into the structure of compact astronomical objects and the nature of gravity in the strong regime. Modifications of near-horizon physics can imprint on the late time ringdown waveform, leaving behind a train of echoes, from which useful information about new physics in the strong gravity regime can be extracted. We propose a novel approach to compute the ringdown waveform and characterize individual echoes perturbatively using the Fredholm determinants, which can be intuitively represented via a diagrammatical scheme. Direct non-perturbative treatments can also be easily implemented for some cases. Numerically, the method is also effective and accurate even for relatively low resources.