On weakly turbulent instability of anti-de Sitter space

Understand

We study the nonlinear evolution of a weakly perturbed anti-de Sitter (AdS) spacetime by solving numerically the four-dimensional spherically symmetric Einstein-massless-scalar field equations with negative cosmological constant.

• Our results suggest that AdS spacetime 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.