Quasinormal modes and thermodynamic phase transitions

Abstract

It has recently been suggested that scalar, Dirac and Rarita-Schwinger perturbations are related to thermodynamic phase transitions of charged (Reissner-Nordstr\"om) black holes. In this note we show that this result is probably a numerical coincidence, and that the conjectured correspondence does not straightforwardly generalize to other metrics, such as Kerr or Schwarzschild (anti-)de Sitter. Our calculations do not rule out a relation between dynamical and thermodynamical properties of black holes, but they suggest that such a relation is non-trivial.