Superradiant instabilities in the Kerr-mirror and Kerr-AdS black holes

Abstract

It has been recently observed that a scalar field with Robin boundary conditions (RBCs) can trigger both a superradiant and a bulk instability for a Banados-Teitelboim-Zanelli (BTZ) black hole (BH) [1]. To understand the generality and scrutinize the origin of this behavior, we consider hem the superradiant instability of a Kerr BH confined either in a mirrorlike cavity or in anti-de Sitter (AdS) space, triggered also by a scalar field with RBCs. These boundary conditions are the most general ones that ensure the cavity/AdS space is an isolated system and include, as a particular case, the commonly considered Dirichlet boundary conditions (DBCs). Whereas the superradiant modes for some RBCs differ only mildly from the ones with DBCs, in both cases, we find that as we vary the RBCs the imaginary part of the frequency may attain arbitrarily large positive values. We interpret this growth as being sourced by a bulk instability of both confined geometries when certain RBCs are imposed to either the mirrorlike cavity or the AdS boundary, rather than by energy extraction from the BH, in analogy with the BTZ behavior.