Late-time tails of wave propagation in higher dimensional spacetimes

We study the late-time tails appearing in the propagation of massless fields (scalar, electromagnetic, and gravitational) in the vicinities of a D-dimensional Schwarzschild black hole. We find that at late times the fields always exhibit a power-law falloff, but the power law is highly sensitive to the dimensionality of the spacetime. Accordingly, for odd $D>3$ we find that the field behaves as t^-(2l+D-2) at late times, where l is the angular index determining the angular dependence of the field. This behavior is entirely due to D being odd; it does not depend on the presence of a black hole in the spacetime. Indeed this tail is already present in the flat space Green's function. On the other hand, for even $D>4$ the field decays as t^-(2l+3D-8), and this time there is no contribution from the flat background. This power law is entirely due to the presence of the black hole. The $D=4$ case is special and exhibits, as is well known, t^-(2l+3) behavior. In the extra dimensional scenario for our Universe, our results are strictly correct if the extra dimensions are infinite, but also give a good description of the late-time behavior of any field if the large extra dimensions are large enough.