Weakly Turbulent Instability of Anti–de Sitter Spacetime

We study the nonlinear evolution of a weakly perturbed anti-de Sitter (AdS) space by solving numerically the four-dimensional spherically symmetric Einstein-massless-scalar field equations with negative cosmological constant. Our results suggest that AdS space is unstable under arbitrarily small generic perturbations. We conjecture that this instability is triggered by a resonant mode mixing which gives rise to diffusion of energy from low to high frequencies.