Quasinormal modes of plane-symmetric black holes according to the AdS/CFT correspondence

Alex S. Miranda, Jaqueline Morgan, Vilson T. Zanchin

Published 2008-09-01, updated 2008-11-03Version 2

The electromagnetic and gravitational quasinormal spectra of $(3+1)$-dimensional plane-symmetric anti-de Sitter black holes are analyzed in the context of the AdS/CFT correspondence. According to such a correspondence, the electromagnetic and gravitational quasinormal frequencies of these black holes are associated respectively to the poles of retarded correlation functions of $R$-symmetry currents and stress-energy tensor in the holographically dual conformal field theory: the $(2+1)$-dimensional $\mathcal{N}=8$ super-Yang-Mills theory. The connection between AdS black holes and the corresponding field theory is used to unambiguously fix the boundary conditions that enter the proper definition of quasinormal modes. Such a procedure also helps one to decide, among the various different possibilities, what are the appropriate gauge-invariant quantities one should use in order to correctly describe the electromagnetic and gravitational blackhole perturbations. These choices imply in different dispersion relations for the quasinormal modes when compared to some of the results in the literature. In particular, the long-distance, low-frequency limit of dispersion relations presents the characteristic hydrodynamic behavior of a conformal field theory with the presence of diffusion, shear, and sound wave modes. There is also a family of purely damped electromagnetic modes which tend to the bosonic Matsubara frequencies in the long-wavelength regime.