TY - JOUR

T1 - Quasinormal Modes and Strong Cosmic Censorship

AU - Cardoso, Vitor

AU - Costa, Joao L.

AU - Destounis, Kyriakos

AU - Hintz, Peter

AU - Jansen, Aron

PY - 2018/1/17

Y1 - 2018/1/17

N2 - The fate of Cauchy horizons, such as those found inside charged black holes, is intrinsically connected to the decay of small perturbations exterior to the event horizon. As such, the validity of the strong cosmic censorship (SCC) conjecture is tied to how effectively the exterior damps fluctuations. Here, we study massless scalar fields in the exterior of Reissner-Nordstrm-de Sitter black holes. Their decay rates are governed by quasinormal modes of the black hole. We identify three families of modes in these spacetimes: one directly linked to the photon sphere, well described by standard WKB-type tools; another family whose existence and time scale is closely related to the de Sitter horizon; finally, a third family which dominates for near-extremally charged black holes and which is also present in asymptotically flat spacetimes. The last two families of modes seem to have gone unnoticed in the literature. We give a detailed description of linear scalar perturbations of such black holes, and conjecture that SCC is violated in the near extremal regime.

AB - The fate of Cauchy horizons, such as those found inside charged black holes, is intrinsically connected to the decay of small perturbations exterior to the event horizon. As such, the validity of the strong cosmic censorship (SCC) conjecture is tied to how effectively the exterior damps fluctuations. Here, we study massless scalar fields in the exterior of Reissner-Nordstrm-de Sitter black holes. Their decay rates are governed by quasinormal modes of the black hole. We identify three families of modes in these spacetimes: one directly linked to the photon sphere, well described by standard WKB-type tools; another family whose existence and time scale is closely related to the de Sitter horizon; finally, a third family which dominates for near-extremally charged black holes and which is also present in asymptotically flat spacetimes. The last two families of modes seem to have gone unnoticed in the literature. We give a detailed description of linear scalar perturbations of such black holes, and conjecture that SCC is violated in the near extremal regime.

KW - BLACK-HOLE

KW - WAVE-EQUATION

KW - ASYMPTOTICS

KW - INTERIOR

KW - ENERGY

U2 - 10.1103/PhysRevLett.120.031103

DO - 10.1103/PhysRevLett.120.031103

M3 - Journal article

VL - 120

JO - Physical Review Letters

JF - Physical Review Letters

SN - 0031-9007

IS - 3

M1 - 031103

ER -