Generic Modified Teukolsky Formalism beyond General Relativity for Spherically Symmetric Cases

Abstract: The observation of gravitational waves has inaugurated a new era for testing gravitational theories in strong-field, nonlinear regimes. Gravitational waves emit during the ringdown phase of binary black hole mergers and from extreme mass ratio inspirals are particularly sensitive to the properties of black holes, making them crucial for probing deviations from general relativity. These studies need a robust foundation in black hole perturbation theory beyond general relativity. While existing studies have employed black hole perturbation theories to explore modifications beyond general relativity, they often focus on specific alternative theories or phenomenological models of quantum gravity. In this paper, we establish a modified decoupled Teukolsky formalism that is broadly applicable to spherically symmetric spacetimes without requiring a predetermined gravitational Lagrangian. This formalism uses the Newman-Penrose framework, which utilizes curvature perturbations characterized by Weyl scalars, to accommodate a wider class of spacetimes beyond general relativity. Our approach correctly handles non-Ricci-flat backgrounds and circumvents subtle analytical issues associated with effective potentials that are present in other modified Teukolsky formalisms.