Elastic instability of black rings at large D

Abstract

Using the inverse dimensional expansion method we study the elastic instability of black rings found recently in numerical analysis of fully nonlinear dynamical evolutions. In our analysis we should perform 1/D^1/2 expansions, not usual 1/D expansions, of the Einstein equations to capture this elastic instability of D dimensional black rings. By solving the Einstein equations at large D we obtain the effective equations for black rings, and the perturbation analysis of the large D effective equations with 1/D^1/2 expansions yields the formula for quasinormal mode frequencies. From this formula, we find that black rings actually suffer from both elastic and Gregory-Laflamme like instabilities. These instabilities are coupled and appear at the same time as observed in numerical analysis. The elastic instability does disappear at the infinite limit of a ring radius, which implies that the (boosted) black string is stable to elastic perturbations. Furthermore we observe that the Gregory-Laflamme like instability becomes more efficient than the elastic instability even for certain thin black rings in enough higher dimensions.