A wave impinging on a Kerr black hole can be amplified as it scatters off the hole if certain conditions are satisfied giving rise to superradiant scattering. By placing a mirror around the black hole one can make the system unstable. This is the black hole bomb of Press and Teukolsky. We investigate in detail this process and compute the growing timescales and oscillation frequencies as a function of the mirror's location. It is found that in order for the system black hole plus mirror to become unstable there is a minimum distance at which the mirror must be located. We also give an explicit example showing that such a bomb can be built. In addition, our arguments enable us to justify why large Kerr-AdS black holes are stable and small Kerr-AdS black holes should be unstable.

A wave impinging on a Kerr black hole can be amplified as it scatters off the hole if certain conditions are satisfied giving rise to superradiant scattering. By placing a mirror around the black hole one can make the system unstable. This is the black hole bomb of Press and Teukolsky. We investigate in detail this process and compute the growing timescales and oscillation frequencies as a function of the mirror's location. It is found that in order for the system black hole plus mirror to become unstable there is a minimum distance at which the mirror must be located. We also give an explicit example showing that such a bomb can be built. In addition, our arguments enable us to justify why large Kerr-AdS black holes are stable and small Kerr-AdS black holes should be unstable.

Gravitational wave solutions to Einstein's equations and their generation are examined in Ddimensional flat spacetimes. First the plane wave solutions are analyzed; then the wave generation is studied with the solution for the metric tensor being obtained with the help of retarded Ddimensional Green's function. Due to the difficulties in handling the wave tails in odd dimensions we concentrate our study in even dimensions. We compute the metric quantities in the wave zone in terms of the energy momentum tensor at retarded time. Some special cases of interest are studied: first the slow motion approximation, where the D-dimensional quadrupole formula is deduced.Within the quadrupole approximation, we consider two cases of interest, a particle in circular orbit and a particle falling radially into a higher dimensional Schwarzschild black hole. Then we turn our attention to the gravitational radiation emitted during collisions lasting zero seconds, i.e., hard collisions. We compute the gravitational energy radiated during the collision of two point particles, in terms of a cutoff frequency. In the case in which at least one of the particles is a black hole, we argue this cutoff frequency should be close to the lowest gravitational quasinormal frequency. In this context, we compute the scalar quasinormal frequencies of higher dimensional Schwarzschild black holes. Finally, as an interesting new application of this formalism, we compute the gravitational energy release during the quantum process of black hole pair creation. These results might be important in light of the recent proposal that there may exist extra dimensions in the Universe, one consequence of which may be black hole creation at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

We study the quasi-normal modes (QNM) of electromagnetic and gravitational perturbations of a Schwarzschild black hole in an asymptotically Anti-de Sitter (AdS) spacetime. Some of the electromagnetic modes do not oscillate, they only decay, since they have pure imaginary frequencies. The gravitational modes show peculiar features: the odd and even gravitational perturbations no longer have the same characteristic quasinormal frequencies. There is a special mode for odd perturbations whose behavior differs completely from the usual one in scalar and electromagnetic perturbation in an AdS spacetime, but has a similar behavior to the Schwarzschild black hole in an asymptotically flat spacetime: the imaginary part of the frequency goes as 1 r + , where r + is the horizon radius. We also investigate the small black hole limit showing that the imaginary part of the frequency goes as r 2 + . These results are important to the AdS/CFT conjecture since according to it the QNMs describe the approach to equilibrium in the conformal field theory.

We calculate the quasinormal modes and associated frequencies of the Bañados-Teitelboim-Zanelli ͑BTZ͒ nonrotating black hole. This black hole lives in 2ϩ1 dimensions in an asymptotically anti-de Sitter spacetime. We obtain exact results for the wave function and quasinormal frequencies of scalar, electromagnetic and Weyl ͑neutrino͒ perturbations.