Gravitational instability of an extreme Kerr black hole

Abstract

Aretakis has proved the existence of an instability of a massless scalar field at the horizon of an extreme Kerr or Reissner-Nordstr\"om black hole: for generic initial data, a transverse derivative of the scalar field at the horizon does not decay, and higher transverse derivatives blow up. We show that a similar instability occurs for linearized gravitational, and electromagnetic, perturbations of an extreme Kerr black hole. We show also that the massless scalar field instability occurs for extreme black hole solutions of a large class of theories in various spacetime dimensions.