Shaping black hole resonances I. Black hole ringdown as a spectral filtering process

Abstract

The ringdown of a perturbed black hole (BH) can be described as a superposition of quasinormal modes (QNMs), whose frequencies are determined by the spacetime geometry while their amplitudes depend also on the perturbing source. However, the physical mechanism governing mode excitation remains unclear and is typically treated on a case by case basis. In this work, we show that QNM excitation is governed by a simple spectral rule: each mode is excited according to the Fourier content of the perturbation evaluated at its characteristic frequency. This result follows from the factorization of the excitation coefficients and establishes a direct, quantitative connection between the spectral properties of the perturbation and the resulting ringdown amplitudes. To make this mechanism explicit and controllable, we construct localized perturbations with independently tunable spectral bandwidth and carrier frequency. We demonstrate analytically and numerically that BHs act as resonant spectral filters. We show analytically that the excitation amplitude of each mode equals the weighted spatial Fourier transform of the initial data evaluated at wavenumber $k\sim\omega_n$ so that the filter selectively excites modes whose frequencies lie within the spectral support of the perturbation while suppressing others. Consequently, the excitation is maximized when the dominant perturbation frequency lies close to the real part of the QNM frequency, and we validate this at the percent level with fits to time-domain numerical evolutions. To robustly perform these fits, we have developed a new fitting algorithm, $\mathtt{QNMToolkit}$, which performs ringdown fits over large ensembles of sliding time-domain windows and quantifies the resulting fitting variance.