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Quasinormal modes of NUT-charged black branes in the AdS/CFT correspondence

We study the scalar, electromagnetic and gravitational perturbations of planar AdS$_4$ black holes with NUT charge. In the context of the AdS/CFT correspondence, these solutions describe a thermal quantum field theory embedded in a Gödel-type universe with closed time-like curves. For a given temperature and NUT charge, two different planar Taub-NUT solutions exist, but we show that only the one with a positive specific heat contributes to the Euclidean saddle point in the path integral. By using the Newman-Penrose formalism, we then derive the master equations satisfied by scalar, electromagnetic and gravitational perturbations in this background, and show that the corresponding equations are separable. Interestingly, the solutions pile up in the form of Landau levels, and hence are characterized by a single quantum number $q$. We determine the appropriate boundary conditions satisfied by the master variables and using these we compute the quasinormal modes of scalar and gravitational perturbations. On the other hand, electromagnetic perturbations depend on a free parameter whose determination is problematic. We find that all the scalar and gravitational QNM frequencies lie in the lower half of the complex plane, indicating that these Taub-NUT spacetimes are stable. We discuss the implications of these results in the light of the AdS/CFT correspondence.