PreprintarXiv licencearXiv
Black Hole Fine Structure
Abstract
In General Relativity, axial and polar black-hole perturbations share identical quasinormal-mode spectra, a property known as isospectrality. New physics can break this degeneracy, producing a spectral splitting analogous to atomic fine structure. We perform a theory-agnostic search for such splitting in gravitational-wave observations. We find no evidence for isospectrality breaking and place a combined 90% upper limit of <28.5% on the relative frequency splitting. We map these constraints onto several modified-gravity theories, constraining the coupling-lengths to be ≲ 28 km.
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BibTeX
@misc{chung2026black,
title = {{Black Hole Fine Structure}},
author = {Adrian Ka-Wai Chung and Richard Dyer and Tomasz Kinowski and Christopher J. Moore},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.18989},
eprint = {2610.18989},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18989},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Black Hole Fine Structure
AU - Adrian Ka-Wai Chung
AU - Richard Dyer
AU - Tomasz Kinowski
AU - Christopher J. Moore
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/13
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.18989
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18989
AB - In General Relativity, axial and polar black-hole perturbations share identical quasinormal-mode spectra, a property known as isospectrality. New physics can break this degeneracy, producing a spectral splitting analogous to atomic fine structure. We perform a theory-agnostic search for such splitting in gravitational-wave observations. We find no evidence for isospectrality breaking and place a combined 90% upper limit of <28.5% on the relative frequency splitting. We map these constraints onto several modified-gravity theories, constraining the coupling-lengths to be ≲ 28 km.
ER -