In this paper, we provide an elementary, unified treatment of two distinct blue-shift instabilities for the scalar wave equation on a fixed Kerr black hole background: the celebrated blue-shift at the Cauchy horizon (familiar from the strong cosmic censorship conjecture) and the time-reversed red-shift at the event horizon (relevant in classical scattering theory). Our first theorem concerns the latter and constructs solutions to the wave equation on Kerr spacetimes such that the radiation field along the future event horizon vanishes and the radiation field along future null infinity decays at an arbitrarily fast polynomial rate, yet, the local energy of the solution is infinite near any point on the future event horizon. Our second theorem constructs solutions to the wave equation on rotating Kerr spacetimes such that the radiation field along the past event horizon (extended into the black hole) vanishes and the radiation field along past null infinity decays at an arbitrarily fast polynomial rate, yet, the local energy of the solution is infinite near any point on the Cauchy horizon. The results make essential use of the scattering theory developed in Dafermos, Rodnianski and Shlapentokh-Rothman (A scattering theory for the wave equation on Kerr black hole exteriors (2014). arXiv:1412.8379) and exploit directly the time-translation invariance of the scattering map and the non-triviality of the transmission map.
Theorem above concerning the event horizon @math is related to a similar result proven in @cite_23 for the Schwarzschild @math case using certain monotonicity properties of the wave equation in spherical symmetry (Theorem 11.1 of @cite_23 ). In particular, the above generalisation shows that Theorem 2 of @cite_23 holds for all @math .
@cite_23
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We develop a definitive physical-space scattering theory for the scalar wave equation on Kerr exterior backgrounds in the general subextremal case |a|<M. In particular, we prove results corresponding to "existence and uniqueness of scattering states" and "asymptotic completeness" and we show moreover that the resulting "scattering matrix" mapping radiation fields on the past horizon and past null infinity to radiation fields on the future horizon and future null infinity is a bounded operator. The latter allows us to give a time-domain theory of superradiant reflection. The boundedness of the scattering matrix shows in particular that the maximal amplification of solutions associated to ingoing finite-energy wave packets on past null infinity is bounded. On the frequency side, this corresponds to the novel statement that the suitably normalised reflection and transmission coefficients are uniformly bounded independently of the frequency parameters. We further complement this with a demonstration that superradiant reflection indeed amplifies the energy radiated to future null infinity of suitable wave-packets as above. The results make essential use of a refinement of our recent proof [M. Dafermos, I. Rodnianski and Y. Shlapentokh-Rothman, Decay for solutions of the wave equation on Kerr exterior spacetimes III: the full subextremal case |a|<M, arXiv:1402.6034] of boundedness and decay for solutions of the Cauchy problem so as to apply in the class of solutions where only a degenerate energy is assumed finite. We show in contrast that the analogous scattering maps cannot be defined for the class of finite non-degenerate energy solutions. This is due to the fact that the celebrated horizon red-shift effect acts as a blue-shift instability when solving the wave equation backwards.