Ladder Symmetries of Higher Dimensional Black Holes
Abstract
We compute the ladder operators for static tidal perturbations to higher-dimensional black holes. These operators map between solutions of the relevant equation of motion at different multipole orders. We focus on spin 0, 1 and 2 perturbations to the Schwarzschild-Tangherlini black hole and on spin 0 perturbations to the 5D Myers-Perry black hole. The ladder structure, used in conjunction with the existence of special ground state solutions, explains why the Love numbers of these higher-dimensional black holes vanish for specific combinations of the multipole moment and number of spacetime dimensions. This generalizes previous work on a ladder symmetry explanation for the vanishing of 4D black hole static Love numbers to higher dimensions.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2510.26748,
title = {Ladder Symmetries of Higher Dimensional Black Holes},
author = {Roman Berens and Lam Hui and Daniel McLoughlin and Adam R. Solomon and John Staunton},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.26748},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
30 pages, v2: Submitted version