Quasinormal Modes of pp-Wave Spacetimes and Zero Temperature Dissipation
Abstract
We compute the quasinormal mode spectrum of scalar perturbations on Kaigorodov pp-wave spacetimes, the horizonless gravity duals of zero temperature null fluids. The pp-wave deformation promotes the Poincar\'e horizon at to an irregular singular point of rank , which acts as a geometric absorber for ingoing waves: rank~ corresponds to thermal dissipation, rank~ to quantum-critical (extremal black hole), and rank~ to gapped, horizonless dissipation. For (extremal BTZ) the radial equation reduces to the Whittaker equation with exact non-dissipative spectrum ; for all modes satisfy , establishing zero temperature dissipation without horizon or entropy. At zeroth order the radial equation becomes Bessel's equation of order , proving all scalar QNMs are gapped. Numerical spectra for yield a discrete dissipative tower and confirm linear stability.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2604.13516,
title = {Quasinormal Modes of pp-Wave Spacetimes and Zero Temperature Dissipation},
author = {Huayu Dai and Guangtao Zeng},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.13516},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
v2: Added a detailed description of Figure 1 and updated references