Resonant excitation of black holes by massive bosonic fields and giant ringings

Abstract

We consider the massive scalar field, the Proca field and the Fierz-Pauli field in the Schwarzschild spacetime and we focus more particularly on their long-lived quasinormal modes. We show numerically that the associated excitation factors have a strong resonant behavior and we confirm this result analytically from semiclassical considerations based on the properties of the unstable circular geodesics on which a massive particle can orbit the black hole. The conspiracy of (i) the long-lived behavior of the quasinormal modes and (ii) the resonant behavior of their excitation factors induces intrinsic giant ringings, i.e., ringings of a huge amplitude. Such ringings, which are moreover slowly decaying, are directly constructed from the retarded Green function. If we describe the source of the black hole perturbation by an initial value problem with Gaussian initial data, i.e., if we consider the excitation of the black hole from an extrinsic point of view, we can show that these extraordinary ringings are still present. This suggests that physically realistic sources of perturbations should generate giant and slowly decaying ringings and that their existence could be used to constrain ultralight bosonic field theory interacting with black holes.