Trapping of waves and null geodesics for rotating black holes

Abstract

We present dynamical properties of linear waves and null geodesics valid for Kerr and Kerr-de Sitter black holes and their stationary perturbations. The two are intimately linked by the geometric optics approximation. For the nullgeodesic flow the key property is the r-normal hyperbolicity of the trapped set and for linear waves it is the distribution of quasi-normal modes: the exact quantization conditions do not hold for perturbations but the bounds on decay rates and the statistics of frequencies are still valid.