Quasinormal modes of black holes: The improved semianalytic approach

Abstract

We extend the semianalytic technique of Iyer and Will for computing the complex quasinormal frequencies of black holes, $\ensuremath{\omega}$, by constructing the Pad\'e approximants of the (formal) series for ${\ensuremath{\omega}}^{2}$. It is shown that for the (so-far best documented) quasinormal frequencies of the Schwarzschild and Reissner-Nordstr\"om black holes the Pad\'e transforms ${P}_{6}^{6}$ and ${P}_{7}^{6}$ are, within the domain of applicability, always in excellent agreement with the numerical results. We argue that the method may serve as a black box with the ``potential'' $Q(x)$ as an input and the accurate quasinormal modes as the output. The generalizations and modifications of the method are briefly discussed as well as the preliminary results for other classes of black holes.