Quasi-Normal Modes of Schwarzschild Anti-De Sitter Black Holes: Electromagnetic and Gravitational Perturbations

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the quasi-normal modes of electromagnetic and gravitational perturbations of Schwarzschild-AdS black holes, revealing unique behaviors and their implications for the AdS/CFT correspondence.

Contribution

It provides new insights into the distinct quasi-normal mode spectra for electromagnetic and gravitational perturbations in Schwarzschild-AdS black holes.

Findings

Electromagnetic modes can be purely decaying with no oscillation.

Odd and even gravitational perturbations have different characteristic frequencies.

The imaginary part of frequencies scales as 1/r+ for large black holes and as r+^2 for small black holes.

Abstract

We study the quasi-normal modes (QNM) of electromagnetic and gravitational perturbations of a Schwarzschild black hole in an asymptotically Anti-de Sitter (AdS) spacetime. Some of the electromagnetic modes do not oscillate, they only decay, since they have pure imaginary frequencies. The gravitational modes show peculiar features: the odd and even gravitational perturbations no longer have the same characteristic quasinormal frequencies. There is a special mode for odd perturbations whose behavior differs completely from the usual one in scalar and electromagnetic perturbation in an AdS spacetime, but has a similar behavior to the Schwarzschild black hole in an asymptotically flat spacetime: the imaginary part of the frequency goes as 1/r+, where r+ is the horizon radius. We also investigate the small black hole limit showing that the imaginary part of the frequency goes as r+^2. These results are important to the AdS/CFT conjecture since according to it the QNMs describe the approach to equilibrium in the conformal field theory.