Quasinormal Modes and Strong Cosmic Censorship

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

Documents

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.

Original languageEnglish
Article number031103
JournalPhysical Review Letters
Volume120
Issue number3
Number of pages6
ISSN0031-9007
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 17 Jan 2018
Externally publishedYes

    Research areas

  • BLACK-HOLE, WAVE-EQUATION, ASYMPTOTICS, INTERIOR, ENERGY

ID: 299202647