Can One Hear the Absence of a Singularity?

Abstract

One of the central expectations of quantum gravity is the resolution of the curvature singularities predicted by General Relativity, potentially giving rise to effective black-hole geometries that are regular inside the horizon. We show that, for a very broad class of regular black holes including several known solutions, the quasinormal-mode spectrum in the large-overtone limit differs discontinuously from that of a Schwarzschild black hole, even when the regularization parameter is arbitrarily small. The real part of the quasinormal frequencies vanishes asymptotically, rather than approaching a nonzero constant, as generically occurs in General Relativity and other theories predicting black holes with curvature singularities. The asymptotic black-hole spectrum thus retains a distinctive imprint of singularity resolution. We establish these results analytically through a systematic formulation of the monodromy method and confirm them numerically. We interpret this phenomenon as a manifestation of black-hole spectral instability, whereby arbitrarily small deviations from vacuum General Relativity produce nonperturbative changes in the large-overtone spectrum.