Quasinormal modes of Gauss-Bonnet black holes at large D

Abstract: Einstein's General Relativity theory simplifies dramatically in the limit that the spacetime dimension D is very large. This could still be true in the gravity theory with higher derivative terms. In this paper, as the first step to study the gravity with a Gauss-Bonnet(GB) term, we compute the quasi-normal modes of the spherically symmetric GB black hole in the large D limit. When the GB parameter is small, we find that the non-decoupling modes are the same as the Schwarzschild case and the decoupled modes are slightly modified by the GB term. However, when the GB parameter is large, we find some novel features. We notice that there are another set of non-decoupling modes due to the appearance of a new plateau in the effective radial potential. Moreover, the effective radial potential for the decoupled vector-type and scalar-type modes becomes more complicated. Nevertheless we manage to compute the frequencies of the these decoupled modes analytically. When the GB parameter is neither very large nor very small, though analytic computation is not possible, the problem is much simplified in the large D expansion and could be numerically treated. We study numerically the vector-type quasinormal modes in this case.