Superradiant instabilities in the Kerr-mirror and Kerr-AdS black holes with Robin boundary conditions

TL;DR

This paper investigates superradiant instabilities in Kerr black holes confined in mirror-like cavities or AdS space, triggered by scalar fields with Robin boundary conditions, revealing conditions that lead to bulk instabilities rather than energy extraction.

Contribution

It extends the analysis of superradiant instabilities to general Robin boundary conditions in Kerr black holes, highlighting the potential for bulk instabilities under these conditions.

Findings

Superradiant modes vary mildly with Robin boundary conditions compared to Dirichlet conditions.

The imaginary part of the frequency can grow arbitrarily large with certain RBCs.

Bulk instabilities can occur independently of energy extraction from the black hole.

Abstract

It has been recently observed that a scalar field with Robin boundary conditions (RBCs) can trigger both a superradiant and a bulk instability for a BTZ black hole (BH). To understand the generality and scrutinize the origin of this behavior, we consider here the superradiant instability of a Kerr BH confined either in a mirror-like cavity or in AdS space, triggered also by a scalar field with RBCs. These boundary conditions are the most general ones that ensure the cavity/AdS space is an isolated system, and include, as a particular case, the commonly considered Dirichlet boundary conditions (DBCs). Whereas the superradiant modes for some RBCs differ only mildly from the ones with DBCs, in both cases we find that as we vary the RBCs, the imaginary part of the frequency may attain arbitrarily large positive values. We interpret this growth as being sourced by a bulk instability of both confined geometries when certain RBCs are imposed to either the mirror-like cavity or the AdS boundary, rather than by energy extraction from the BH, in analogy with the BTZ behavior.