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Abstract

Owing to its substantial implications for black hole spectroscopy, spectral instability has attracted considerable attention in the literature. While the emergence of such instability is attributed to the non-Hermitian nature of the gravitational system, it remains sensitive to various factors. About the spatial scale of the metric deformation, spectral instability is particularly susceptible to ``ultraviolet'' metric perturbations. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of black hole spectral instability triggered by random and deterministic metric perturbations. We investigate the dependence on the magnitude, spatial scale, and localization of the metric perturbations in the P\"oschl-Teller effective potential, and discuss the underlying physical interpretations. It is observed that small metric perturbations initially have a limited impact on the less damped black hole quasinormal modes, and deviations typically around their unperturbed values, a phenomenon first derived by Skakala and Visser in a more restrictive context. In the higher overtone region, the deformation propagates, amplifies, and eventually gives rise to spectral instability and, inclusively, bifurcation in the quasinormal mode spectrum. While deterministic metric perturbations give rise to a deformed but well-defined quasinormal spectrum, random perturbations lead to uncertainties in the resulting spectrum. Nonetheless, the primary trend of the spectral instability remains consistent, being sensitive to both the strength and location of the perturbation. However, we demonstrate that the observed spectral instability might be suppressed for metric perturbations that are physically appropriate.