Classical Stability of Black D3-branes

We have investigated the classical stability of charged black $D3$-branes in type IIB supergravity under small perturbations. For s-wave perturbations it turns out that black $D3$-branes are unstable when they have small charge density. As the charge density increases for given mass density, however, the instability decreases down to zero at a certain finite value of the charge density, and then black $D3$-branes become stable all the way down to the extremal point. It has also been shown that such critical value at which its stability behavior changes agrees very well with the predicted one by the thermodynamic stability behavior of the corresponding black hole system through the Gubser-Mitra conjecture. Unstable mode solutions we found involve non-vanishing fluctuations of the self-dual five-form field strength. Some implications of our results are also discussed.