Scalar quasinormal modes of Schwarzschild--anti-de Sitter black holes: spectral analysis and generalized boundary conditions

Abstract

We study quasinormal modes (QNMs) of a minimally coupled massless scalar field on four-dimensional Schwarzschild--anti-de Sitter black holes using a Chebyshev spectral method. After compactifying the exterior domain, the radial problem is formulated as a quadratic matrix pencil in the dimensionless frequency. For the standard Dirichlet, or vanishing-field, boundary condition at the conformal AdS boundary, we reproduce the known scalar spectra across small, intermediate, and large black holes, including long overtone sequences and the expected approach to pure-AdS normal modes in the small black hole limit. We then deform the AdS boundary condition by imposing a generalized relation between the two independent asymptotic coefficients of the massless scalar. This deformation is treated as a generalized coefficient boundary condition for the massless scalar, and not as the usual alternative quantization for scalars in the Breitenlohner-Freedman window. The Dirichlet endpoint recovers the stable standard spectrum. For every non-Dirichlet value examined, and for representative small, intermediate, and large black holes, we find an additional mode with positive imaginary part, signaling a boundary-condition-induced instability. A near-Dirichlet refinement finds no finite critical angle down to the smallest deformation probed.