Relaxation dynamics of charged gravitational collapse

We study analytically the relaxation dynamics of charged test fields left outside a newly born charged black hole. In particular, we obtain a simple analytic expression for the fundamental quasinormal resonances of near-extremal Reissner-Nordstrom black holes. The formula is expressed in terms of the black-hole physical parameters: omega = q phi - i2 pi T-BH(n + 1/2), where T-BH and phi are the temperature and electric potential of the black hole, and q is the charge of the field. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.