Abstract
We study the late-time tails appearing in the propagation of massless fields (scalar, electromagnetic, and gravitational) in the vicinities of a D-dimensional Schwarzschild black hole. We find that at late times the fields always exhibit a power-law falloff, but the power law is highly sensitive to the dimensionality of the spacetime. Accordingly, for odd we find that the field behaves as at late times, where l is the angular index determining the angular dependence of the field. This behavior is entirely due to D being odd; it does not depend on the presence of a black hole in the spacetime. Indeed this tail is already present in the flat space Green’s function. On the other hand, for even the field decays as and this time there is no contribution from the flat background. This power law is entirely due to the presence of the black hole. The case is special and exhibits, as is well known, behavior. In the extra dimensional scenario for our Universe, our results are strictly correct if the extra dimensions are infinite, but also give a good description of the late-time behavior of any field if the large extra dimensions are large enough.
- Received 14 July 2003
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.68.061503
©2003 American Physical Society