Weakly turbulent instability of anti-de Sitter spacetime

Phys Rev Lett. 2011 Jul 15;107(3):031102. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.107.031102. Epub 2011 Jul 15.

Abstract

We study the nonlinear evolution of a weakly perturbed anti-de Sitter (AdS) space by solving numerically the four-dimensional spherically symmetric Einstein-massless-scalar field equations with negative cosmological constant. Our results suggest that AdS space is unstable under arbitrarily small generic perturbations. We conjecture that this instability is triggered by a resonant mode mixing which gives rise to diffusion of energy from low to high frequencies.