2025/07/16 by Calvin Y. -R. Chen, Chen, Calvin Y. -R., Áron D. Kovács +1 · 2 citations
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · #Diffusion and Search Dynamics #FOS: Physical sciences #General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc) #High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2507.12529
openalex publication_date 2025/07/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/14 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We investigate how the Aretakis instability affects non-dilatonic extremal black p-branes by focusing on their near-horizon geometry. Crucially, the strength of the instability, i.e. the number of transverse derivatives needed to see non-decay/blow-up of fields on the horizon at late null time, is given by the scaling dimensions with respect to the near-horizon AdSp+2-factor. This renders the problem of determining the severity of the Aretakis instability equivalent to computing the Kaluza--Klein spectrum of fields on Freund--Rubin spaces. We use this to argue that non-dilatonic extremal black branes suffer from the Aretakis instability even in the absence of additional fields -- we find that this is weaker than for extremal black holes. We also argue that the scaling dimensions determine the smoothness of stationary deformations to the original black brane background -- here, our findings indicate that generically more modes can lead to worse curvature singularities compared to extremal black holes.