Ladder operators and quasinormal modes in Bañados-Teitelboim-Zanelli black holes

Abstract: We study quasinormal modes (QNMs) of massive Klein-Gordon fields in static Ba~{n}ados-Teitelboim-Zanelli (BTZ) black holes in terms of ladder operators constructed from spacetime conformal symmetries. Because the BTZ spacetime is locally isometric to the three-dimensional anti-de Sitter spacetime, ladder operators, which map a solution of the massive Klein-Gordon equation into that with different mass squared, can be constructed from spacetime conformal symmetries. In this paper, we apply the ladder operators to the QNMs of the Klein-Gordon equations in the BTZ spacetime. We demonstrate that the ladder operators can change indices of QNM overtones, and all overtone modes can be generated from a fundamental mode when we impose the Dirichlet or Neumann boundary condition at infinity. We also discuss the case with the Robin boundary condition.