Quasinormal modes (QNM) are the modes of energy dissipation of a perturbed object or field, i.e. they describe perturbations of a field that decay in time.
A familiar example is the perturbation (gentle tap) of a wine glass with a knife: the glass begins to ring, it rings with a set, or superposition, of its natural frequencies — its modes of sonic energy dissipation. One could call these modes normal if the glass went on ringing forever. Here the amplitude of oscillation decays in time, so we call its modes quasi-normal. To a very high degree of accuracy, quasinormal ringing can be approximated by
where is the amplitude of oscillation, is the frequency, and is the decay rate. The quasinormal frequency is described by two numbers,