Black Holes and Wormholes in Higher-Curvature Corrected Theories of Gravity

Abstract

The presented thesis is devoted to the study of instabilities of compact objects within the Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet theory. This theory includes higher-order corrections in curvature, which are inspired by the low energy limit of string theory. We study linear instability of higher-dimensional black holes in the de Sitter universe. The time-domain picture allows us to obtain the parametric region of stability for the gravitational perturbations in all three channels, i.e., for scalar-type, vector-type, and tensor-type perturbations. We observed that while the scalar and tensor channels show instability for some choice of the parameters, the vector-type perturbations are always stable. Furthermore, we show that the quasinormal frequencies of the scalar type of gravitational perturbations do not obey Hod's inequality, however, the other two channels, vector and tensor, have lower-lying modes that confirm Hod's conjecture. We also studied stability of the wormholes in the four-dimensional Einstein-dilaton-Gauss-Bonnet gravity proposed by P. Kanti, B. Kleihaus, J. Kunz in arXiv:1108.3003 . These wormholes were claimed to be stable against linear radial perturbations. However, our time-domain analysis allowed us to prove such wormholes are linearly unstable against general radial perturbations for any values of their parameters. We observed that the exponential growth appears after a long period of damped oscillations. This behaviour is qualitatively similar to the instability profile of the higher-dimensional black holes in the Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet theory.