pp-Waves and the Hidden Symmetries of Black Hole Quasinormal Modes

arXiv:2412.08551

There are two interesting classes of trapped null geodesics in any black hole spacetime: those that lie on the photon ring and those that generate the horizon. Recent work introduced a “near-ring” scaling limit that exhibits the emergent symmetries of the eikonal quasinormal mode (QNM) spectrum associated to the photon ring. This analysis was reformulated geometrically by Fransen using the Penrose limit, which produces pp-waves from geodesics. We elaborate on and generalize various aspects of this construction for the Schwarzschild black hole. We also discuss the Penrose limit onto the horizon generators. This second limit, although technically simpler, also displays emergent near-horizon symmetries that explain the equally-spaced overtones of the highly-damped QNM spectrum. In both examples, symmetry considerations distinguish the QNM solutions from the scattering states and produce overtones as descendants.