Instability of ultra-spinning black holes

Abstract

It has long been known that, in higher-dimensional general relativity, there are black hole solutions with an arbitrarily large angular momentum for a fixed mass. We examine the geometry of the event horizon of such ultra-spinning black holes and argue that these solutions become unstable at large enough rotation. Hence we find that higher-dimensional general relativity imposes an effective `Kerr-bound' on spinning black holes through a dynamical decay mechanism. Our results also give indications of the existence of new stationary black holes with `rippled' horizons of spherical topology. We consider various scenarios for the possible decay of ultra-spinning black holes, and finally discuss the implications of our results for black holes in braneworld scenarios.