Ringing of rotating black holes in higher-derivative gravity

We compute scalar quasinormal mode (QNM) frequencies in rotating black hole solutions of the most general class of higher-derivative gravity theories to quartic order in the curvature that reduce to general relativity for weak fields and are compatible with its symmetries. The wave operator governing the QNMs is not separable, but we show one can extract the QNM frequencies by a projection onto the set of spheroidal harmonics. We have obtained accurate results for the quasinormal frequency corrections relative to Kerr for rotating black holes with dimensionless spins up to 0. 7. We also discuss to what extent our results carry over to the phenomenologically more relevant case of gravitational QNMs. Finally, we provide an ancillary computational package that allows one to generalize our calculations to any effective energy-momentum tensor arising from higher-derivative terms in the effective action.