We advocate for an alternative description of gravitational radiation from black holes based on complex angular momentum techniques (analytic continuation of partial wave expansions, duality of the $\mathcal{S}$-matrix and effective resummations involving its Regge poles and the associated residues, Regge trajectories, semiclassical interpretations, etc.). Such techniques, which proved to be very helpful in various areas of physics to describe and analyze resonant scattering, were only marginally used in the context of black hole physics. Here, by considering the multipolar waveform generated by a massive particle falling radially from infinity into a Schwarzschild black hole, we show that they could play a fundamental role in gravitational-wave physics. More precisely, from the multipole expansion defining the Weyl scalar ${\mathrm{\Psi }}_4$, we extract the Fourier transform of a sum over Regge poles and their residues, which can be evaluated numerically from the associated Regge trajectories. This Regge pole approximation permits us to reconstruct, for an arbitrary direction of observation, a large part of the multipolar waveform ${\mathrm{\Psi }}_4$. In particular, it can reproduce with very good agreement the quasinormal ringdown as well as with rather good agreement the tail of the signal. This is achieved even if we take into account only one Regge pole, and if a large number of modes are excited, the result can be improved by considering additional poles. Moreover, while quasinormal-mode contributions do not provide physically relevant results at “early times” due to their exponentially divergent behavior as time decreases, it is not necessary to determine from physical considerations a starting time for the Regge ringdown.

• Received 24 July 2018

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.98.064052