Pseudospectrum and (in)stability of black hole total transmission modes

Abstract

Total transmission modes (TTMs) are modes with complex frequencies that propagate across a black hole spacetime without reflection. Recently, it is found that suitably tailored time-dependent scattering can excite these complex modes and suppress the reflected signal for the entire duration of the process, a phenomenon referred to as virtual absorption. Motivated by this, we present a study of the spectrum stability of TTMs using pseudospectrum and condition numbers. We focus on perturbations of $d$-dimensional Tangherlini black holes and recast the TTM problem as a generalized eigenvalue problem by utilizing the Eddington-Finkelstein coordinates. The results show that TTMs are generically spectrally unstable, with sensitivity increasing for higher overtones, in close analogy with quasinormal modes. A notable exception is the purely imaginary TTM in the positive imaginary axis in higher dimensions. Its pseudospectrum contours are nearly concentric, and its condition number is orders of magnitude smaller than those of the overtones, indicating enhanced spectral stability. As the spacetime dimension decreases, the condition number grows and becomes much larger in four dimensions in both the energy norm and the $L^2$ norm, suggesting possible spectral instability, although a definitive cross-dimensional conclusion is limited by the lack of a uniform physically preferred norm. Additionally, we confirm that purely imaginary TTMs occur for gravitational vector perturbations, whereas genuinely complex TTM families appear only in sufficiently high dimensions, $d \geqslant 8$, extending earlier claims that placed the onset at $d \geqslant 10$.