Wave Propagation on Microstate Geometries

Supersymmetric microstate geometries were recently conjectured (Eperon et al. in JHEP 10:031, 2016. 10.1007/JHEP10(2016)031) to be nonlinearly unstable due to numerical and heuristic evidence, based on the existence of very slowly decaying solutions to the linear wave equation on these backgrounds. In this paper, we give a thorough mathematical treatment of the linear wave equation on both two- and three-charge supersymmetric microstate geometries, finding a number of surprising results. In both cases, we prove that solutions to the wave equation have uniformly bounded local energy, despite the fact that three-charge microstates possess an ergoregion; these geometries therefore avoid Friedman’s “ergosphere instability” (Friedman in Commun Math Phys 63(3):243–255, 1978). In fact, in the three-charge case we are able to construct solutions to the wave equation with local energy that neither grows nor decays, although these data must have non-trivial dependence on the Kaluza–Klein coordinate. In the two-charge case, we construct quasimodes and use these to bound the uniform decay rate, showing that the only possible uniform decay statements on these backgrounds have very slow decay rates. We find that these decay rates are sublogarithmic, verifying the numerical results of Eperon et al. (2016). The same construction can be made in the three-charge case, and in both cases the data for the quasimodes can be chosen to have trivial dependence on the Kaluza–Klein coordinates.