Massive spin-2 fields on black hole spacetimes: Instability of the Schwarzschild and Kerr solutions and bounds on the graviton mass

By R. Brito, V. Cardoso, Paolo Pani. 2013

206 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Massive bosonic fields of arbitrary spin are predicted by general extensions of the standard model. It has been recently shown that there exists a family of bimetric theories of gravity—including massive gravity—which are free of Boulware-Deser ghosts at the nonlinear level. This opens up the possibility to describe consistently the dynamics of massive spin-2 particles in a gravitational field. Within this context, we develop the study of massive spin-2 fluctuations—including massive gravitons—around Schwarzschild and slowly rotating Kerr black holes. Our work has two important outcomes. First, we show that the Schwarzschild geometry is linearly unstable for small tensor masses, against a spherically symmetric mode. Second, we provide solid evidence that the Kerr geometry is also generically unstable, both against the spherical mode and against long-lived superradiant modes. In the absence of nonlinear effects, the observation of spinning black holes bounds the graviton mass μ to be μ≲5×10-23 eV.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6fcbd3e98024c1f0dffcba90f7e8f5ac27dc2631

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Citations in the corpus

Superradiance: Energy Extraction, Black-Hole Bombs and Implications for Astrophysics and Particle Physics (2015, methodology): “In addition to these modes, a new polar dipole mode was found [11].”
Superradiance (2015, methodology): “In the limit MμT 1, and for the static case, the imaginary part was found to scale as [12] ωI/μT ≈ −(MμT ) .”
Heavy spin-2 Dark Matter (2016, background): “For instance, the instability found for spherically symmetric black holes [79, 80] — which is clearly a distinctive feature of bimetric theory, since in GR such black holes are stable — disappears for large mFP, since the instability range is limited to mFP .”
A systematic approach to generalisations of General Relativity and their cosmological implications (2018, background): “Furthermore, the study of linear perturbations admits an unstable mode with a Gregory-Laflamme instability [305, 306], which seems to be persistent and surfaces also in bi-Kerr geometry.”
Constraining the mass of dark photons and axion-like particles through black-hole superradiance (2018, background): “[28]), inclusion of plasma effects [83, 84] and boson self-interactions [85], and extension to massive spin-2 fields, whose instability time scale is even shorter than for spin-1 fields [86].”
Spherically symmetric solutions in higher-derivative gravity (2015, result): “This instability is compared to Schwarzschild instabilities found in massive theories of gravity [25].”