High and low dimensions in the black hole negative mode

The negative mode of the Schwarzschild black hole is central to Euclidean quantum gravity around hot flat space and for the Gregory-Laflamme black string instability. We analyze the eigenvalue as a function of spacetime dimension λ = λ(d) by constructing two perturbative expansions: one for large d and the other for small d - 3, and determining as many coefficients as we are able to compute analytically. By joining the two expansions, we obtain an interpolating rational function accurate to better than 2% through the whole range of dimensions including d = 4.