Near-zone symmetries of Kerr black holes

Abstract

We study the near-zone symmetries of a massless scalar field on four-dimensional black hole backgrounds. We provide a geometric understanding that unifies various recently discovered symmetries as part of an SO(4, 2) group. Of these, a subset are exact symmetries of the static sector and give rise to the ladder symmetries responsible for the vanishing of Love numbers. In the Kerr case, we compare different near-zone approximations in the literature, and focus on the implementation that retains the symmetries of the static limit. We also describe the relation to spin-1 and 2 perturbations.