Gravitational wave echoes induced by a point mass plunging into a black hole

Abstract

Abstract Recently, the possibility of detecting gravitational wave echoes in the data stream subsequent to the binary black hole mergers observed by LIGO was suggested. Motivated by this suggestion, we presented templates of echoes based on black hole perturbations in our previous work. There, we assumed that the incident waves resulting in echoes are similar to the ones that directly escape to the asymptotic infinity. In this work, to extract more reliable information on the waveform of echoes without using the naive assumption on the incident waves, we investigate gravitational waves induced by a point mass plunging into a Kerr black hole. We solve the linear perturbation equation with the source term induced by the plunging mass under the purely outgoing boundary condition at infinity and a hypothetical reflection boundary condition near the horizon. We find that the low-frequency component below the threshold of the super-radiant instability is highly suppressed, which is consistent with the incident waveform assumed in the previous analysis. We also find that the high-frequency mode excitation is significantly larger than the one used in the previous analysis, if we adopt the perfectly reflective boundary condition independently of the frequency. When we use a simple template in which the same waveform as the direct emissions to infinity is repeated with the decreasing amplitude, the correlation between the expected signal and the template turns out to decrease very rapidly.