Black hole quasibound states from a draining bathtub vortex flow

Abstract: Quasinormal modes are a set of damped resonances that describe how an excited open system is driven back to equilibrium. In gravitational physics these modes characterise the ringdown of a perturbed black hole, e.g. following a binary black hole merger. A careful analysis of the ringdown spectrum reveals the properties of the black hole, such as its angular momentum and mass. In more complex gravitational systems the spectrum might depend on more parameters, and hence allows us to search for new physics. In this letter we present a hydrodynamic analogue of a rotating black hole, that illustrates how the presence of extra structure affects the quasinormal mode spectrum. The analogy is obtained by considering wave scattering on a draining bathtub vortex flow. We show that due to vorticity of the background flow, the resulting field theory corresponds to a scalar field on an effective curved spacetime which acquires a local mass in the vortex core. The obtained quasinormal mode spectrum exhibits long-lived trapped modes, commonly known as quasibound states. Our findings can be tested in future experiments, building up on recent successful implementations of analogue rotating black holes.