Quasinormal modes in Schwarzschild-de Sitter spacetime: A simple derivation of the level spacing of the frequencies

It is known that the imaginary parts of the quasinormal mode (QNM) frequencies for the Schwarzschild black hole are evenly spaced with a spacing that depends only on the surface gravity. On the other hand, for massless minimally coupled scalar fields, there exist no QNMs in the pure de Sitter spacetime. It is not clear what the structure of the QNMs would be for the Schwarzschild-de Sitter (SDS) spacetime, which is characterized by two different surface gravities. We provide a simple derivation of the imaginary parts of the QNM frequencies for the SDS spacetime by calculating the scattering amplitude in the first Born approximation and determining its poles. We find that, for the usual set of boundary conditions in which the incident wave is scattered off the black hole horizon, the imaginary parts of the QNM frequencies have an equally spaced structure with the level spacing depending on the surface gravity of the black hole. Several conceptual issues related to the QNM are discussed in the light of this result and a comparison with previous work is presented.