ArXiv TLDR

Taming the Aretakis instability: extremal black holes with multi-degenerate horizons

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2604.15260

Shreyansh Agrawal, Panagiotis Charalambous, Laura Donnay, Stefano Liberati, Giulio Neri

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TLDR

This paper shows that Aretakis instability in extremal black holes weakens with increasing horizon degeneracy, proposing a stable, infinitely degenerate black hole.

Key contributions

  • Investigates Aretakis instability in extremal black holes with degenerate horizons.
  • Demonstrates that Aretakis instability weakens as horizon degeneracy increases.
  • Proposes a novel black hole geometry featuring an infinitely degenerate horizon.
  • Suggests this new geometry is stable against Aretakis perturbations, a potential "graveyard" state.

Why it matters

Extremal black holes face the Aretakis instability, posing a challenge to their long-term stability. This research offers a potential solution by proposing a new, infinitely degenerate black hole geometry. This could represent a stable, final "graveyard" state for these objects, advancing our understanding of black hole evolution.

Original Abstract

Stationary black hole geometries with non-degenerate Cauchy horizons are classically unstable due to mass inflation. At extremality, mass inflation is absent, but a different dynamical instability arises: the Aretakis instability. In this work, we investigate the properties of degenerate horizons and their associated Aretakis instabilities. By studying examples with increasingly higher-order horizon degeneracy, we show that the Aretakis instability weakens as the degree of degeneracy grows. Motivated by these results, we propose a new black hole geometry characterized by an infinitely degenerate horizon, which we argue is stable under Aretakis-type perturbations and may therefore provide a concrete realization of a "graveyard" end state for these objects.

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