Quasinormal modes of black holes with multiple photon spheres

Abstract

For a static and spherically symmetric black hole, a photon sphere is composed of circular null geodesics of fixed radius, and plays an important role in observing the black hole. Recently, in an Einstein-Maxwell-scalar model with a non-minimal coupling between the scalar and electromagnetic fields, a class of hairy black holes has been found to possess two unstable and one stable circular null geodesics on the equatorial plane, corresponding to three photon spheres outside the event horizon. In this paper, we study quasinormal modes of the scalar field, which are associated with these circular null geodesics, in the hairy black hole spacetime. In the eikonal regime with l ≫ 1, the real part of the quasinormal modes is determined by the angular velocity of the corresponding circular geodesics. The imaginary part of the quasinormal modes associated with the unstable circular null geodesics encodes the information about the Lyapunov exponent of the corresponding circular geodesics. Interestingly, we find long-lived and sub-long-lived modes, which are associated with the stable and one of the unstable circular null geodesics, respectively. Due to tunneling through potential barriers, the damping times of the long-lived and sub-long-lived modes can be exponentially and logarithmically large in terms of l, respectively.