Korteweg-de Vries integrals for modified black hole potentials: instabilities and other questions

Abstract Quasi-normal modes (QNMs) and greybody factors are some of the most characteristic features of the dynamics of black holes (BHs) and represent the basis for a number of fundamental physics tests with gravitational wave observations. It is therefore important to understand the properties of these quantities, naturally introduced within BH perturbation theory, in particular the stability properties under modifications of the BH potential. Instabilities in the QNMs have been recently shown to appear in the BH pseudospectrum under certain circumstances. In this work, we give a novel point of view based on the existence of some recently discovered hidden symmetries in BH dynamics and the associated infinite series of conserved quantities, the Korteweg-de Vries (KdV) integrals. We provide different motivations to use the KdV integrals as indicators of some crucial BH spectral properties. In particular, by studying them in different scenarios described by modified BH barriers, we find strong evidence that the KdV conserved quantities represent a useful tool to look for instabilities in the BH spectrum of QNMs and in their greybody factors.