Liouvillian quasi-normal modes of Kerr-Newman black holes

The radial differential equations associated with separable perturbations of Kerr-Newman black holes are known to admit Liouvillian (closed-form) solutions for constrained frequencies and black hole parameters. In this paper, we show that the parameter constraints are satisfied exactly in the case of no rotation and thereby obtain a countable infinity of exact purely damped quasi-normal modes of fields on a Reissner-Nordstrom background at special values of the black hole charge-mass ratio. We show that with rotation the parameter constraints for Liouvillian quasi-normal modes are satisfied approximately in two distinct physical scenarios, where analytical approximations for angular eigenvalues are known. We arrive at functional expressions for quasi-normal frequencies and wave-functions in the case of near-extremal slow rotation and in a particular case of highly damped scalar modes of Kerr and Kerr-Newman. In the near-extremal case, our formulas extend a recent result of Hod to electromagnetic and gravitational perturbations. (C) 2012 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4723815]