Superradiant instability of charged scalar fields in higher-dimensional Reissner-Nordström-de Sitter black holes

Black holes possess trapping regions which lead to intriguing dynamical effects. By properly scattering test fields off a black hole, one can extract energy from it, leading to the growth of the amplitude of the test field in expense of the black hole's energy. Such a dynamical phenomenon is called superradiance. Here, we study charged-scalar-field instabilities of Reissner-Nordström black holes immersed in a d–dimensional de Sitter Universe. By performing a thorough frequency-domain analysis we compute the unstable quasinormal resonances and link their presence with a novel family of quasinormal modes associated with the existence and timescale of the cosmological horizon of pure de Sitter spacetime. Our results indicate that such an instability is caused by superradiance, while the increment of dimensions amplifies the growth rate and enlarges the region of the parameter space where, both massless and massive, test fields are unstable.