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  • Letter
  • Open Access

Quantum induced superradiance

Casey Cartwright1, Umut Gürsoy1, Juan F. Pedraza2, and Andrew Svesko3

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Phys. Rev. D 112, L041903 – Published 26 August, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/dhsc-9kk9

Abstract

Superradiance, the phenomenon enabling energy extraction through radiation amplification, is not universal to all black holes. We show that semiclassical backreaction can induce superradiance, even when absent at the classical level. Specifically, we compute the quasinormal modes of a massless scalar field probing a family of rotating “quantum” black holes in three-dimensional anti-de Sitter space, accounting for all orders of backreaction due to quantum conformal matter. A subset of these modes is identified as superradiant, leading to the formation of quantum black hole “bombs.” Further, we find all thermally unstable black holes exhibit modal linear instabilities, though the converse does not hold generally. Our findings thus suggest a semiclassical version of the Hollands-Wald conjecture on black hole stability. This motivates us to propose a stability criterion for quantum black holes.

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Phys. Rev. D 112, L041903– Published 26 August, 2025
  • Received 26 February 2025
  • Accepted 24 July 2025
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.

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