The fate of Cauchy horizons, such as those found inside charged black holes, is intrinsically connected to the decay of small perturbations exterior to the event horizon. As such, the validity of the strong cosmic censorship (SCC) conjecture is tied to how effectively the exterior damps fluctuations. Here, we study massless scalar fields in the exterior of Reissner-Nordström-de Sitter black holes. Their decay rates are governed by quasinormal modes of the black hole. We identify three families of modes in these spacetimes: one directly linked to the photon sphere, well described by standard WKB-type tools; another family whose existence and timescale is closely related to the de Sitter horizon. Finally, a third family which dominates for near-extremally-charged black holes and which is also present in asymptotically flat spacetimes. The last two families of modes seem to have gone unnoticed in the literature. We give a detailed description of linear scalar perturbations of such black holes, and conjecture that SCC is violated in the near extremal regime.

No abstract

Abstract. In this paper we show the small data solvability of suitable semilinear wave and Klein-Gordon equations on geometric classes of spaces, which include so-called asymptotically de Sitter and Kerr-de Sitter spaces, as well as asymptotically Minkowski spaces. These spaces allow general infinities, called conformal infinity in the asymptotically de Sitter setting; the Minkowski type setting is that of non-trapping Lorentzian scattering metrics introduced by Baskin, Vasy and Wunsch. Our results are obtained by showing the global Fredholm property, and indeed invertibility, of the underlying linear operator on suitable L 2 -based function spaces, which also possess appropriate algebra or more complicated multiplicative properties. The linear framework is based on the b-analysis, in the sense of Melrose, introduced in this context by Vasy to describe the asymptotic behavior of solutions of linear equations. An interesting feature of the analysis is that resonances, namely poles of the inverse of the Mellin transformed b-normal operator, which are 'quantum' (not purely symbolic) objects, play an important role.

We show that linear scalar waves are bounded and continuous up to the Cauchy horizon of Reissner-Nordström-de Sitter and Kerr-de Sitter spacetimes, and in fact decay exponentially fast to a constant along the Cauchy horizon. We obtain our results by modifying the spacetime beyond the Cauchy horizon in a suitable manner, which puts the wave equation into a framework in which a number of standard as well as more recent microlocal regularity and scattering theory results apply. In particular, the conormal regularity of waves at the Cauchy horizon -which yields the boundedness statement -is a consequence of radial point estimates, which are microlocal manifestations of the blue-shift and red-shift effects.