AdS nonlinear instability: breaking spherical and axial symmetries

Considerable effort has been dedicated to study the nonlinear instability of anti-de Sitter (AdS) within spherical symmetry, but little is known about this nonlinear instability in the purely gravitational sector, where spherical symmetry is necessarily broken. In Bizon and Rostworowski (2011 Phys. Rev. Lett. 107 031102) the onset of such nonlinear instability was associated with the existence of irremovable secular resonances at third order in perturbation theory. Furthermore, it was also conjectured in Bizon and Rostworowski (2011 Phys. Rev. Lett. 107 031102) that certain very fine tuned initial data would not collapse. Such solutions, upon linearisation, correspond to individual normal modes of AdS, which can be consistently backreacted to all orders in perturbation theory. However, the analysis of Bizon and Rostworowski (2011 Phys. Rev. Lett. 107 031102) was restricted to spherical symmetry. The perturbative arguments of Bizon and Rostworowski (2011 Phys. Rev. Lett. 107 031102) were then generalised to gravitational perturbations in Dias et al (2012 Class. Quantum Grav. 29 194002), and in particular certain time-periodic solutions were also conjectured to exist-these were coined geons. However, in Dias et al (2012 Class. Quantum Grav. 29 194002), only a certain class of perturbations was considered, for which the perturbative analysis considerably simplifies. In this manuscript we present details of the systematic computational formalism and an exhaustive and complementary analysis of physical properties of the geons and gravitational AdS instability that were absent in our companion Letter (Dias and Santos 2016 Class. Quantum Grav. 33 23LT01). In particular, we find that, unlike in spherical symmetry, a (single) gravitational normal mode of AdS can be backreacted to generate a nonlinear solution only in very exceptional circumstances. We also show that weak turbulent perturbative theory predicts the existence of direct and inverse cascades, and give evidence suggesting that the former dominates the latter for equal energy two-mode seeds.