Quasinormal modes of black holes and dissipative open systems

After explaining the physical origin of the quasinormal modes of perturbations in the background geometry of a black hole, I critically review the recent proposal for the quantization of the black-hole area based on the real part of quasinormal modes. As instantons due to the barriers of black-hole potentials lie at the root of a discrete set of complex quasinormal modes frequencies, it is likely that the physics of quasinormal modes can be learned from quantum theory. I propose a connection of a system of quasinormal modes of black holes with a dissipative open system, in particular, the Feshbach-Tikochinsky oscillator. This argument is supported in part by the fact that these two systems have the same group structure SU(1,1) and the same group representation of Hamiltonians; thereby, their quantum states exhibit the same behavior.