Evanescent ergosurface instability

Abstract

Some exotic compact objects possess evanescent ergosurfaces: timelike submanifolds on which a Killing vector field, which is timelike everywhere else, becomes null. We show that any manifold possessing an evanescent ergosurface but no event horizon exhibits a linear instability of a peculiar kind: either there are solutions to the linear wave equation which concentrate a finite amount of energy into an arbitrarily small spatial region, or the energy of waves measured by a stationary family of observers can be amplified by an arbitrarily large amount. In certain circumstances we can rule out the first type of instability. We also provide a generalisation to asymptotically Kaluza-Klein manifolds. This instability bears some similarity with the "ergoregion instability" of Friedman, and we use many of the results from the recent proof of this instability by Moschidis.

Final version, accepted for publication in APDE. Typos corrected, a new argument is presented in section 11 correcting the original argument. This new argument proceeds via a double interpolation argument, making use of a time and angular frequency decomposition. 71 pages, 3 figures