Damped and zero-damped quasinormal modes of charged, nearly extremal black holes

Abstract

Despite recent progress, the complete understanding of the perturbations of charged, rotating black holes as described by the Kerr-Newman metric remains an open and fundamental problem in relativity. In this study, we explore the existence of families of quasinormal modes of Kerr-Newman black holes whose decay rates limit to zero at extremality, called zero-damped modes in past studies. We review the nearly extremal and WKB approximation methods for spin-weighted scalar fields (governed by the Dudley-Finley equation) and give an accounting of the regimes where scalar zero-damped and damped modes exist. Using Leaver’s continued fraction method, we verify that these approximations give accurate predictions for the frequencies in their regimes of validity. In the nonrotating limit, we argue that gravito-electromagnetic perturbations of nearly extremal Reissner-Nordstrom black holes have zero-damped modes in addition to the well-known spectrum of damped modes. We provide an analytic formula for the frequencies of these modes, verify their existence using a numerical search, and demonstrate the accuracy of our formula. These results, along with recent numerical studies, point to the existence of a simple universal equation for the frequencies of zero-damped gravito-electromagnetic modes of Kerr-Newman black holes, whose precise form remains an open question.