Jacopo Lestingi, Laura Sberna, Stephen R. Green

Deviations from vacuum general relativity (such as modified theories or the presence of an environment) produce small shifts in black hole quasinormal mode (QNM) spectra. These effects are becoming increasingly relevant for gravitational wave astronomy as observations of ringdown spectra become more precise. The first-order frequency shift (in a small dimensionless coupling parameter) is now well understood, but no systematic framework exists to compute higher order corrections. The major obstacle is that QNMs do not form a complete basis due to the non-self-adjointness of the system. Nevertheless, it was recently shown that QNMs are orthogonal with respect to an appropriate bilinear form. In this work, we use the bilinear form to systematically lift Schrödinger perturbation theory to the black hole setting. We obtain a formula for quasinormal frequency shifts to any order, in terms of lower order mode shifts. We also provide a spectral decomposition of the first-order mode shift, which involves projections onto unperturbed QNMs along with continuous-spectrum contributions -- making incompleteness explicit. We illustrate the framework on slowly-spinning Kerr and Pöschl-Teller examples, where we find that the QNM sum itself diverges.