Reconstruction of ringdown with excitation factors

Abstract: In black hole perturbation formalism, the gravitational waveform is obtained by the convolution of the Green's function and the source term causing radiation emission. Hence, the ringdown properties, namely its start time, depend on both functions. The unknown time-shift encoded in the Green's function introduces a "time-shift problem" for ringdown. We study the ringdown time-shift problem by reconstructing a waveform via the excitation factors of quasi-normal modes (QNMs) of a spinning black hole. For the first time, we reconstruct ringdown with a significant number of QNMs weighted with their excitation factors and confirm its excellent convergence. We then precisely identify the ringdown starting time. We also find (i) that for moderate or large spins and $\ell=m=2$, QNMs should be included up to around the $20$th prograde overtones and around fifth retrograde overtones to reconstruct the ringdown waveform for the delta-function source with a mismatch threshold $ M < O(10^{-3})$. For higher angular modes, a more significant number of QNMs are necessary to reconstruct it; (ii) that the time shift of ringdown caused by the Green's function is the same for different $(\ell, m, n)$ modes but that nontrivial sources can change this conclusion. Finally, we demonstrate (iii) that the greybody factor can be reconstructed with the superposed QNM spectrum in the frequency domain.