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Black hole superradiance in dynamical spacetime

William E. East, Fethi M. Ramazanoğlu, and Frans Pretorius
Phys. Rev. D 89, 061503(R) – Published 20 March 2014

Abstract

We study the superradiant scattering of gravitational waves by a nearly extremal black hole (dimensionless spin a=0.99) by numerically solving the full Einstein field equations, thus including backreaction effects. This allows us to study the dynamics of the black hole as it loses energy and angular momentum during the scattering process. To explore the nonlinear phase of the interaction, we consider gravitational wave packets with initial energies up to 10% of the mass of the black hole. We find that as the incident wave energy increases, the amplification of the scattered waves, as well as the energy extraction efficiency from the black hole, is reduced. During the interaction the apparent horizon geometry undergoes sizable nonaxisymmetric oscillations. The largest amplitude excitations occur when the peak frequency of the incident wave packet is above where superradiance occurs, but close to the dominant quasinormal mode frequency of the black hole.

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  • Received 18 December 2013

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.89.061503

© 2014 American Physical Society

Authors & Affiliations

William E. East1,*, Fethi M. Ramazanoğlu2, and Frans Pretorius2

  • 1Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, Stanford University, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Menlo Park, California 94025, USA
  • 2Department of Physics, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544, USA

  • *weast@stanford.edu

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Vol. 89, Iss. 6 — 15 March 2014

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