QNMs of branes, BHs and fuzzballs from quantum SW geometries

Abstract

QNMs govern the linear response to perturbations of BHs, D-branes and fuzzballs and the gravitational wave signals in the ring-down phase of binary mergers. A remarkable connection between QNMs of neutral BHs in 4d and quantum SW geometries describing the dynamics of N=2 SYM theories has been recently put forward. We extend the gauge/gravity dictionary to a large class of gravity backgrounds including charged and rotating BHs of Einstein-Maxwell theory in d=4,5 dimensions, D3-branes, D1D5 ‘circular’ fuzzballs and smooth horizonless geometries; all related to N=2 SYM with a single SU(2) gauge group and fundamental matter. We find that photon-spheres, a common feature of all examples, are associated to degenerations of the classical elliptic SW geometry whereby a cycle pinches to zero size. Quantum effects resolve the singular geometry and lead to a spectrum of quantized energies, labelled by the overtone number n. We compute the spectrum of QNMs using exact WKB quantization, geodetic motion and numerical simulations and show excellent agreement between the three methods. We explicitly illustrate our findings for the case D3-brane QNMs.