Extremal charged black holes and superradiantly unstable quasinormal modes

Abstract

Abstract It was recently shown that the extremal charged black holes in STU supergravity suffer from superradiant instability owing to the existence of the unstable (low-frequency) quasibound states associated with a charged massive scalar field. In this paper, we show numerically that for some charge configurations, these black holes can also excite the (higher-frequency) superradiantly unstable quasinormal modes. We find empirically that the unstable modes are closely related to having a volcano-shaped effective potential in the Schrödinger-like wave equation.