We prove that, in a class of spherically symmetric spacetimes exhibiting stable trapping of null geodesics, linear waves cannot (uniformly) decay faster than logarithmically. When these linear waves are treated as a model for nonlinear perturbations, this slow decay is highly suggestive of nonlinear instability. We also prove that, in a large class of asymptotically flat, spherically symmetric spacetimes, logarithmic decay actually holds as a uniform upper bound. In the presence of stable trapping, this result is therefore the best one can obtain. In addition, we provide an application of these results to ultracompact neutron stars, suggesting that all stars with r < 3M might be unstable.

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Supersymmetric microstate geometries were recently conjectured [1] 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" [2]. 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 this data must have nontrivial 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 sub-logarithmic, verifying the numerical results of [1]. 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. arXiv:1609.01733v1 [gr-qc]

Some exotic compact objects, including supersymmetric microstate geometries and certain boson stars, possess evanescent ergosurfaces: timelike submanifolds on which a Killing vector field, which is timelike everywhere else, becomes null. We show that any manifold possessing an evanescent ergosurface but no event horizon exhibits a linear instability of a peculiar kind: either there are solutions to the linear wave equation which concentrate a finite amount of energy into an arbitrarily small spatial region, or the energy of waves measured by a stationary family of observers can be amplified by an arbitrarily large amount. In certain circumstances we can rule out the first type of instability. We also provide a generalisation to asymptotically Kaluza-Klein manifolds. This instability bears some similarity with the "ergoregion instability" of Friedman [1], and we use many of the results from the recent proof of this instability by Moschidis [2].