Integrability in Perturbed Black Holes: Background Hidden Structures

TL;DR

This paper explores hidden integrable structures in perturbed non-rotating black holes, revealing potential for a new understanding of black hole dynamics through symmetry and hierarchy analysis.

Contribution

It systematically investigates integrable structures in black hole perturbation theory, linking wave equations to infinite hierarchies of symmetries and slow-fast degrees of freedom.

Findings

Wave master equations possess infinite symmetries related to KdV hierarchies.

Structural relations between bulk and boundary contributions reveal slow and fast DoFs.

Extension of analysis from Cauchy slices to hyperboloidal foliations uncovers underlying integrable structures.

Abstract

In this work we investigate the presence of integrable hidden structures in the dynamics of perturbed non-rotating black holes (BHs). This can also be considered as a first step in a wider program of an effective identification of ``slow'' and ``fast'' degrees of freedom (DoFs) in the (binary) BH dynamics, following a wave-mean flow perspective. The slow DoFs would be associated with a nonlinear integrable dynamics, on which the fast ones propagate following an effective linear dynamics. BH perturbation theory offers a natural ground to test these properties. Indeed, the decoupling of Einstein equations into wave master equations with a potential provides an instance of such splitting into (frozen) slow DoFs (background potential) over which the linear dynamics of the fast ones (perturbation master functions) evolve. It has been recently shown that these wave equations possess an infinite number of symmetries that correspond to the flow of the infinite hierarchy of Korteweg-de Vries (KdV) equations. Starting from these results, we systematically investigate the presence of integrable structures in BH perturbation theory. We first study them in Cauchy slices and then extend the analysis to hyperboloidal foliations. This second step introduces a splitting of the master equation into bulk and boundary contributions, unveiling an underlying structural relation with the slow and fast DoFs. This insight represents a first step to establish the integrable structures associated to the slow DoFs as bulk symmetries of the dynamics of perturbed BHs.