Topical Review: greybody factors and quasinormal modes for black holes in various theories - fingerprints of invisibles

Abstract

We give a pedagogical introduction to black holes (BHs) greybody factors (GFs) and quasinormal modes (QNMs) and share the recent developments on those subjects. To this end, we present some particular analytical and approximation techniques for the computations of the GFs and QNMs. We first review the gravitational GFs and show how they are analytically calculated for static and spherically symmetric higher dimensional BHs, consisting the charged BHs and existence of cosmological constant (i.e. de Sitter (dS)/anti-de Sitter (AdS)AdS BHs). The computations performed involve both the low-energy (having real and small frequencies) and the asymptotic (having extremely high frequency of the scattered wave throughout the imaginary axis) cases. A generic method is discussed at low frequencies. This method can be used for all three types of spacetime asymptotics and it is unaffected by the BH's features. For asymptotically dS BHs, GF varies depending on whether the spacetime dimension is even or odd, and is proportional to the ratio of the event and cosmic horizon areas. At asymptotic frequencies, the GFs can be computed by using a matching technique inspired by the monodromy method. In the meantime, we also make a general literature review on the matching technique in a separate section. While the GFs for charged or asymptotically dS BHs are generated by nontrivial functions, the GF for asymptotically AdS BHs is precisely one: pure black-body emission. QNMs, which are solutions to the relevant perturbation equations that satisfy the boundary conditions for purely outgoing (gravitational) waves at spatial infinity and purely ingoing (gravitational) waves at the event horizon, are considered using some particular analytical (like the matching technique) and approximation methods. In this study, our primary focus will be on the bosonic and fermionic GFs and QNMs of various BH and brane geometries and reveal the fingerprints of the invisibles with the radiation spectra to be obtained by the WKB approximation and bounding the Bogoliubov coefficients (together with the Miller-Good transformation) methods.