Charged particle trajectories in a magnetic field on a curved space-time

Abstract

In this paper we have studied the motion of charged particles in a dipole magnetic field on the Schwarzscbild background geometry. A detailed analysis has been made in the equatorial plane through the study of the effective potential curves. In the case of positive canonical angular momentum the effective potential has two maxima and two minima giving rise to a well-defined potential well rear the event horizon. This feature of the effective potential categorises the particle orbits into four classes, depending on their energies. (i) Particles, coming from infinity with energy less than the absolute maximum ofV _eff, would scatter away after being turned away by the magnetic field. (ii) Whereas those with energies higher than this would go into the central star seeing no barrier. (iii) Particles initially located within the potential well are naturally trapped, and they execute Larmor motion in bound gyrating orbits. (iv) and those with initial positions corresponding to the extrema ofV _eff follow circular orbits which are stable for non-relativistic particles and unstable for relativistic ones. We have also considered the case of negative canonical angular momentum and found that no trapping in bound orbits occur for this case.

In the case when particles are not confined to the equatorial plane we have found that the particles execute oscillatory motion between two mirror points if the magnetic field is sufficiently high, but would continuously fall towards the event horizon otherwise.