Peeling at extreme black hole horizons

Abstract

The starting point of this work was an intriguing similarity between the behaviour of fields near a degenerate horizon and near the infinity of an asymptotically flat spacetime, as revealed by the scattering theory for Dirac fields in the ``exterior'' region of the extreme Kerr - de Sitter black hole, developed by one of the authors (JB). However, in that situation, the comparison was somewhat clouded by some of the analytical techniques used in intermediate steps of the proof. The aim of the present work is to clarify the comparison further by studying instead the peeling behaviour of solutions to the wave equation at an extremal horizon. We focus first on the extreme Reissner-Nordstr\"om black hole, for which the Couch-Torrence inversion (a global conformal isometry that exchanges the horizon and infinity) makes the analogy explicit. Then, we explore more general spherically symmetric situations using the Couch-Torrence inversion outside of its natural context.