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.
- Received 2 November 2017
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.120.031103
© 2018 American Physical Society
Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)
Viewpoint
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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