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Quasinormal Modes and Strong Cosmic Censorship

Vitor Cardoso, João L. Costa, Kyriakos Destounis, Peter Hintz, and Aron Jansen
Phys. Rev. Lett. 120, 031103 – Published 17 January 2018
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Abstract

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–Nordström–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.

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  • Received 2 November 2017

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.120.031103

© 2018 American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Gravitation, Cosmology & Astrophysics

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A Possible Failure of Determinism in General Relativity

Published 17 January 2018

A numerical analysis of perturbations of a charged black hole suggests that the usual predictability of the laws of physics can fail in general relativity.

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Authors & Affiliations

Vitor Cardoso1,2, João L. Costa3,4, Kyriakos Destounis1, Peter Hintz5, and Aron Jansen6

  • 1CENTRA, Departamento de Física, Instituto Superior Técnico—IST, Universidade de Lisboa—UL, Avenida Rovisco Pais 1, 1049 Lisboa, Portugal
  • 2Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, 31 Caroline Street North Waterloo, Ontario N2L 2Y5, Canada
  • 3Departamento de Matemática, ISCTE—Instituto Universitário de Lisboa, Av. Forças Armadas 1649-026 Lisboa, Portugal
  • 4Center for Mathematical Analysis, Geometry and Dynamical Systems, Instituto Superior Técnico—IST, Universidade de Lisboa—UL, Avenida Rovisco Pais 1, 1049 Lisboa, Portugal
  • 5Department of Mathematics, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720-3840, USA
  • 6Institute for Theoretical Physics and Center for Extreme Matter and Emergent Phenomena, Utrecht University, 3508 TD Utrecht, The Netherlands

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Issue

Vol. 120, Iss. 3 — 19 January 2018

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