QUASI-NORMAL MODES OF SCHWARZSCHILD–ANTI-DE SITTER BLACK HOLES: ELECTROMAGNETIC AND GRAVITATIONAL PERTURBATIONS

Abstract

We studied the quasi-normal modes (QNM) of electromagnetic and gravitational perturbations of a Schwarzschild black hole in an asymptotically anti-de Sitter (AdS) spacetime, extending previous works1,2 on the subject. Some of the electromagnetic modes do not oscillate, they only decay, since they have pure imaginary frequencies. The gravitational modes show peculiar features: the odd and even gravitational perturbations no longer have the same characteristic quasinormal frequencies. There is a special mode for odd perturbations whose behavior differs completely from the usual one in scalar1 and electromagnetic perturbation in an AdS spacetime, but has a similar behavior to the Schwarzschild black hole3 in an asymptotically flat spacetime: the imaginary part of the frequency goes as [Formula: see text], where r+ is the horizon radius. We also investigated the small black hole limit showing that the imaginary part of the frequency goes as [Formula: see text]. These results are important to the AdS/CFT4 conjecture since according to it the QNMs describe the approach to equilibrium in the conformal field theory. For other geometries see5,6.