Gravitational-Bumblebee perturbations: Exact decoupling and isospectrality
Abstract
In this paper, we present the exact decoupling of the full metric and bumblebee field perturbations in a Schwarzschild-like background. The coupled system reduces to four decoupled master equations, revealing in each parity sector a Schwarzschild-like gravitational sector and a Lorentz-violating Maxwell-like vector sector. While Lorentz violation modifies the propagation speed of the emergent vector modes, we demonstrate that the gravitational master modes exhibit a ``dynamical immunity'' to the non-minimal Lorentz-violating coupling, and that the odd- and even-parity perturbations remain strictly isospectral. Our work provides a rare example in which Lorentz-violating couplings reshape the field reconstruction while leaving the gravitational ringdown spectrum intact. This mismatch in propagation speeds suggests a possible timing signature of bumblebee vector dynamics in black hole perturbations, offering a theoretical route to testing spontaneous Lorentz symmetry breaking in the era of multi-messenger astronomy.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2605.02820,
title = {Gravitational-Bumblebee perturbations: Exact decoupling and isospectrality},
author = {Hui-Fa Liu and Wentao Liu and Yu-Xiao Liu and Qi Su and Ding-fang Zeng},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.02820},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
12 pages, 1 figure