Beyond Three Terms: Continued Fractions for Rotating Black Holes in Modified Gravity
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2026
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| _version_ | 1866914493086302208 |
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| author | Karikos, Georgios Saes, Jayana A. Wagle, Pratik Yunes, Nicolás |
| author_facet | Karikos, Georgios Saes, Jayana A. Wagle, Pratik Yunes, Nicolás |
| contents | Black-hole ringdown offers a clean probe of strong gravity, but one of its most accurate tools--Leaver's continued-fraction method--requires a three-term recurrence relation. Beyond general relativity, and more generally in non-Kerr spacetimes, Frobenius expansions of the perturbation equations generically produce higher-order recurrence relations and, often, couplings among the series coefficients, obstructing a direct application of Leaver's method. Here we develop a general reduction scheme that maps arbitrary scalar and matrix $N$-term recurrence relations to a three-term form, thereby extending continued fractions to a broad class of perturbation problems in modified gravity. As an application, we compute the quasinormal-mode spectrum of slowly-rotating black holes in dynamical Chern-Simons gravity, where the polar sector yields a 16-term, decoupled, scalar recurrence relation, and the axial sector yields a 12-term, coupled, matrix recurrence relation. After applying our reduction scheme, both systems can be solved with continued fractions. For the fundamental $(\ell,m)=(2,2)$ mode, our results agree well with independent calculations based on eigenvalue-perturbation and metric/spectral methods across the parameter range studied. This framework provides a robust and practical route to precision ringdown calculations beyond the standard three-term setting and supports tests of gravity with current and future gravitational-wave observations. |
| format | Preprint |
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arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_18680 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Beyond Three Terms: Continued Fractions for Rotating Black Holes in Modified Gravity Karikos, Georgios Saes, Jayana A. Wagle, Pratik Yunes, Nicolás General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology Black-hole ringdown offers a clean probe of strong gravity, but one of its most accurate tools--Leaver's continued-fraction method--requires a three-term recurrence relation. Beyond general relativity, and more generally in non-Kerr spacetimes, Frobenius expansions of the perturbation equations generically produce higher-order recurrence relations and, often, couplings among the series coefficients, obstructing a direct application of Leaver's method. Here we develop a general reduction scheme that maps arbitrary scalar and matrix $N$-term recurrence relations to a three-term form, thereby extending continued fractions to a broad class of perturbation problems in modified gravity. As an application, we compute the quasinormal-mode spectrum of slowly-rotating black holes in dynamical Chern-Simons gravity, where the polar sector yields a 16-term, decoupled, scalar recurrence relation, and the axial sector yields a 12-term, coupled, matrix recurrence relation. After applying our reduction scheme, both systems can be solved with continued fractions. For the fundamental $(\ell,m)=(2,2)$ mode, our results agree well with independent calculations based on eigenvalue-perturbation and metric/spectral methods across the parameter range studied. This framework provides a robust and practical route to precision ringdown calculations beyond the standard three-term setting and supports tests of gravity with current and future gravitational-wave observations. |
| title | Beyond Three Terms: Continued Fractions for Rotating Black Holes in Modified Gravity |
| topic | General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.18680 |