Year: 2022
Type: article
Abstract: Superradiance is a process by which massive bosonic particles can extract energy from spinning black holes, leading to the build up of a condensate if the particle has a Compton wavelength comparable to the black hole's Schwarzschild radius. One interesting possibility is that superradiance may occur for photons in a diffuse plasma, where they gain a small effective mass. Studies of the spin-0 case have indicated that such a build up is suppressed by a spatially varying effective mass, supposed to mimic the photons' interaction with a physically realistic plasma density profile. We carry out relativistic simulations of a massive Proca field evolving on a Kerr background, with modifications to account for the spatially varying effective mass. This allows us to treat the spin-1 case directly relevant to photons, and to study the effect of thinner disk profiles in the plasma. We find similar qualitative results to the scalar case, and so support the conclusions of that work: either a constant asymptotic mass or a shell-like plasma structure is required for superradiant growth to occur. We study thin disks and find a leakage of the bosonic condensate that suppresses its growth, concluding that thick disks are more likely to support the instability.
Institutions: Johns Hopkins University, Queen Mary University of London
Language: English
Subfield: Nuclear and High Energy Physics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funders: National Science Foundation, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, University of Texas at Austin, Gauss Centre for Supercomputing, Institute for Data Intensive Research in Astrophysics and Cosmology, University of Washington, Science and Technology Facilities Council, H2020 European Research Council
Awards: G1541806023, Physics and Astrophysics of Compact Binaries, G165597396, G1771230537, G1803984788, DiRAC-2.5 - the pathway to DiRAC Phase 3, G2073976794, G2778679777, G3086115149, G3403823835, G3531124447, G3561040202, The DiRAC 2.5x Facility, Collaborative Research: Understanding Compact Binary Formation with the First Gravitational Wave Detections, Large Scale Structure Constraints of General Relativity, G4279068983, G4448422848, G4490303832, DiRAC 2.5 Operations 2017-2020, G5768834005, G588734541, DiRAC 2.5 - the pathway to DiRAC Phase 3, G5994749408, G5997058474, G6070766847, DiRAC-2.5 DC - Operations 2017-2020, G6537386148, G6873874887, G6926846737, G7108246583, G7521014512, G7573294876, G7702914472, G7937591081, G8570785389, G8710138095, G8710606730, G878803593, DiRAC: Memory Intensive 2.5x
OpenAlex ID: W4221163635