Projecting Gravitational Fluctuations onto Near-Horizon Throats

Abstract

We show that, for stationary geometries whose linearized fluctuation equations separate into radial and angular Heun equations, a pair of diffeomorphisms projects the full problem onto two coupled, isospectral Gauss hypergeometric problems in complementary spacetime regions. This projection requires Robin boundary conditions to be imposed at the intersection between the complementary regions, which are uniquely fixed by requiring the two diffeomorphisms to match there. The method provides an independent derivation of recent results obtained from the correspondence between Heun connection coefficients and instanton partition functions in the Nekrasov-Shatashvili limit. As an application, we identify a subset of modes in Kerr-de Sitter and Kerr-anti-de Sitter black holes that, in the near-extremal limit, continuously reduce to a basis of the Schwarzian/Jackiw-Teitelboim functional space of gravitational fluctuations.