28926 2506.18991 10.1007/JHEP05(2026)140 140 140 Tails from the bulk: gravitational decay in AdS 5 Regular Article - Theoretical Physics 1 34 2026 5 13 2026 1 8 2026 3 16 2026 5 13 2026 5 13 Science and Technology Facilities Council ST/W507350/1 Science and Technology Facilities Council ST/X000664/1 The Author(s) 2026 Open Access. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License ( CC-BY 4.0 ), which permits any use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited. 13130 2026 2026 5 5 John R. V. Crump jrvc2@cam.ac.uk Jorge E. Santos jss55@cam.ac.uk https://ror.org/013meh722 grid.5335.0 0000 0001 2188 5934 Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics University of Cambridge Wilberforce Road Cambridge CB3 0WA U.K. Abstract We study gravitational perturbations of Schwarzschild-AdS black holes in d = 5 and identify a regime of late-time power-law decay for smooth initial data. Based on an analysis of the quasinormal mode spectrum, we predict and characterise this decay behaviour. We perform fully nonlinear numerical evolutions with long integration times that support the prediction and exhibit no signs of instability. Remarkably, the decay is modulated by a universal oscillatory pattern, consistent with subleading corrections from a large-angular-momentum (eikonal) analysis of the quasinormal mode spectrum. Keywords Black Holes AdS-CFT Correspondence Gauge-Gravity Correspondence ArXiv ePrint: 2506.18991