Non-Abelian magnetized blackholes and unstable attractors

Fluctuations of non-Abelian gauge fields in a background magnetic charge contain 'tachyonic' modes which as we will show cause an instability of the background. We extend this result to the cases where the background charge (flux) is coupled to four-dimensional Einstein gravity and show that the corresponding spherically symmetric geometries, which in the absence of a cosmological constant are of the form of (colored) Reissner-Nordstroem blackholes or the AdS2xS2, are also unstable unless the flux assumes its smallest allowed value, in which case the configuration is stable. We discuss the relevance of these instabilities to several places in string theory including various string compactifications and the attractor mechanism. Our results for the latter imply that the attractor mechanism shown to work for the extremal Abelian charged blackholes, cannot be applied in a straightforward way to the extremal non-Abelian colored blackholes, with the exception of the minimally charged stable ones