Instability of small Lovelock black holes in even dimensions

Abstract

We study the stability of static black holes in Lovelock theory, which is a natural higher dimensional generalization of Einstein theory. We derive a master equation for tensor perturbations in general Lovelock theory. It turns out that the resultant equation is characterized by one functional which determines the background black hole solutions. Thus, the stability issue of static black holes under tensor perturbations in general dimensions is reduced to an algebraic problem. We show that small Lovelock black holes in even-dimensions are unstable.