Leandro A. Oliveira

Ergoregion instability: The hydrodynamic vortex

Four-dimensional, asymptotically flat spacetimes with an ergoregion but no horizon have been shown to be linearly unstable against a superradiant-triggered mechanism. This result has wide implications in the search for astrophysically viable alternatives to black holes, but also in the understanding of black holes and Hawking evaporation. Here we investigate this instability in detail for a particular setup that can be realized in the laboratory: the hydrodynamic vortex, an effective geometry for sound waves, with ergoregion and without an event horizon.

Quasinormal modes and Regge poles of the canonical acoustic hole

We compute the quasinormal mode frequencies and Regge poles of the canonical acoustic hole (a black hole analogue), using three methods. First, we show how damped oscillations arise by evolving generic perturbations in the time domain using a simple finite-difference scheme. We use our results to estimate the fundamental quasinormal frequencies of the low multipolar modes l=1,2,.... Next, we apply an asymptotic method to obtain an expansion for the frequency in inverse powers of l+1/2 for low overtones. We test the expansion by comparing against our time-domain results, and (existing) WKB results. The expansion method is then extended to locate the Regge poles. Finally, to check the expansion of Regge poles we compute the spectrum numerically by direct integration in the frequency domain. We give a geometric interpretation of our results and comment on experimental verification.

Superresonant instability of a compressible hydrodynamic vortex

We show that a purely circulating and compressible system, in an adiabatic regime of acoustic propagation, presents superresonant instabilities. To show the existence these instabilities, we compute the quasinormal mode frequencies of this system numerically using two different frequency domain methods.