Spectral stability of near-extremal spacetimes

Abstract

It has been suggested that the spectrum of quasinormal modes of rotating black holes is unstable against additional potential terms in the perturbation equation, as the operator associated with the equation is non-self-adjoint. We point out that a bilinear form has been constructed previously to allow a perturbation analysis of the spectrum, which was applied to study the quasinormal modes of weakly charged Kerr-Newman black holes [Phys. Rev. D 91, 044025 (2015)]. The proposed spectral instability should be restated as instability against potential terms that have an infinitesimal ``energy'' norm that is specifically defined by the type of inner products introduced by Jaramillo et al. and preserving the physical meaning of energy. We argue that it is necessary to address the stability of all previous mode analysis results to reveal their susceptibility to energetically infinitesimal perturbations. In particular, for near-extremal Kerr spacetime, we show that the spectrum of zero-damping modes, which have slow decay rates, is unstable (with order unity fractional change in decay rates) with fine-tuned modification of the potential. The decay rates are, however, always positive with energetically infinitesimal perturbations. If finite potential modifications are allowed near the black hole, it is possible to find superradiantly unstable modes, i.e., a ``black hole bomb'' without an explicit outer shell. For the zero-damping modes in near-extremal Reissner-Nordstr\"om--de Sitter black holes, which are relevant for the breakdown of strong cosmic censorship, we find that the corresponding spectrum is stable under energetically infinitesimal perturbations.