(In)stability of de Sitter quasinormal mode spectra

Abstract

We consider how the quasinormal spectrum for the conformal wave operator on the static patch of de Sitter changes in response to the addition of a small potential. Since the quasinormal modes and co-modes are explicitly known, we are able to give explicit formulae for the instantaneous rate of change of each frequency in terms of the perturbing potential. We verify these exact computations numerically using a novel technique extending the spectral hyperboloidal approach of Jaramillo et al. (2021). We propose a definition for a family of pseudospectra that we show capture the instability properties of the quasinormal frequencies.