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First-Principles Plasma Simulations of Black-Hole Jet Launching

Kyle Parfrey, Alexander Philippov, and Benoît Cerutti
Phys. Rev. Lett. 122, 035101 – Published 23 January 2019
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Abstract

Black holes drive powerful plasma jets to relativistic velocities. This plasma should be collisionless, and self-consistently supplied by pair creation near the horizon. We present general-relativistic collisionless plasma simulations of Kerr-black-hole magnetospheres which begin from vacuum, inject e± pairs based on local unscreened electric fields, and reach steady states with electromagnetically powered Blandford-Znajek jets and persistent current sheets. Particles with negative energy at infinity are a general feature, and can contribute significantly to black-hole rotational-energy extraction in a variant of the Penrose process. The generated plasma distribution depends on the pair-creation environment, and we describe two distinct realizations of the force-free electrodynamic solution. This sensitivity suggests that plasma kinetics will be useful in interpreting future horizon-resolving submillimeter and infrared observations.

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  • Received 5 October 2018

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.122.035101

© 2019 American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Gravitation, Cosmology & AstrophysicsPlasma Physics

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Feeding a Black Hole Jet

Published 23 January 2019

Simulations of the environment around a spinning black hole give new insight into the formation of luminous jets seen from Earth.

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Authors & Affiliations

Kyle Parfrey1,2,3,*, Alexander Philippov2,4, and Benoît Cerutti5

  • 1Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 1 Cyclotron Road, Berkeley, California 94720, USA
  • 2Department of Astronomy and Theoretical Astrophysics Center, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, California 94720, USA
  • 3NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Mail Code 661, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771, USA
  • 4Center for Computational Astrophysics, Flatiron Institute, 162 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10010, USA
  • 5Univ. Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, IPAG, 38000 Grenoble, France

  • *kparfrey@lbl.gov

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Issue

Vol. 122, Iss. 3 — 25 January 2019

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