We develop a search method for gravitational ringing of black holes. The gravitational ringing is due to complex frequency modes called the quasinormal modes that are excited when a black hole geometry is perturbed. The detection of it will be a direct confirmation of the existence of a black hole. Assuming that the ringdown waves are dominated by the least-damped (fundamental) mode with the least imaginary part, we consider matched filtering and develop an optimal method to search for the ringdown waves that have damped sinusoidal wave forms. When we use the matched filtering method, a data analysis with a lot of templates is required. Here we have to ensure a proper match between the filter as a template and the real wave. It is necessary to keep the detection efficiency as high as possible under limited computational costs. First, we consider the white noise case for which the matched filtering can be studied analytically. We construct an efficient method for tiling the template space. Then, using a fitting curve of the TAMA300 DT7 noise spectrum, we numerically consider the case of colored noise. We find our tiling method developed for the white noise case is still valid even if the noise is colored.

• Received 19 June 2003

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.68.102003