Two Regimes of Asymptotic Fall-off of a Massive Scalar Field in the Schwarzschild-de Sitter Spacetime

The decay behavior of a massless scalar field in the Schwarzschild-de Sitter spacetime is well-known to follow an exponential law at asymptotically late times $t \rightarrow \infty$. In contrast, a massive scalar field in the asymptotically flat Schwarzschild background exhibits a decay with oscillatory (sinusoidal) tails enveloped by a power law. We demonstrate that the asymptotic decay of a massive scalar field in the Schwarzschild-de Sitter spacetime is exponential. Specifically, if $\mu M \gg 1$, where $\mu$ and $M$ represent the mass of the field and the black hole, respectively, the exponential decay is also oscillatory. Conversely, in the regime of small $\mu M$, the decay is purely exponential without oscillations. This distinction in decay regimes underscores the fact that, for asymptotically de Sitter spacetimes, a particular branch of quasinormal modes, instead of a "tail", governs the decay at asymptotically late times. There are two branches of quasinormal modes for the Schwarzschild-de Sitter spacetime: the modes of an asymptotically flat black hole corrected by a non-zero $\Lambda$-term, and the modes of an empty de Sitter spacetime corrected by the presence of a black hole. We show that the latter branch is responsible for the asymptotic decay. When $\mu M$ is small, the modes of pure de Sitter spacetime are purely imaginary (non-oscillatory), while at intermediate and large $\mu M$ they have both real and imaginary parts, what produces the two pictures of the asymptotic decay. In addition, we show that the asymptotic decay of charged and higher dimensional black hole is also exponential.