Linear stability of vector Horndeski black holes

Abstract: Horndeski's vector-tensor (HVT) gravity is described by a Lagrangian in which the field strength $F_{\mu \nu}=\partial_{\mu} A_{\nu}-\partial_{\nu} A_{\mu}$ of a vector field $A_{\mu}$ interacts with a double dual Riemann tensor $L^{\mu \nu \alpha \beta}$ in the form $\beta L^{\mu \nu \alpha \beta} F_{\mu \nu} F_{\alpha \beta}$, where $\beta$ is a constant. In Einstein-Maxwell-HVT theory, there are static and spherically symmetric black hole (BH) solutions with electric or magnetic charges, whose metric components are modified from those in the Reissner-Nordstr\"om geometry. The electric-magnetic duality of solutions is broken even at the background level by the nonvanishing coupling constant $\beta$. We compute a second-order action of BH perturbations containing both the odd- and even-parity modes and show that there are four dynamical perturbations arising from the gravitational and vector-field sectors. We derive all the linear stability conditions associated with the absence of ghosts and radial/angular Laplacian instabilities for both the electric and magnetic BHs. These conditions exhibit the difference between the electrically and magnetically charged cases by reflecting the breaking of electric-magnetic duality at the level of perturbations. In particular, the four angular propagation speeds in the large-multipole limit are different from each other for both the electric and magnetic BHs. This suggests the breaking of eikonal correspondence between the peak position of at least one of the potentials of dynamical perturbations and the radius of photon sphere. For the electrically and magnetically charged cases, we elucidate parameter spaces of the HVT coupling and the BH charge in which the BHs without naked singularities are linearly stable.