Floating and Sinking: The Imprint of Massive Scalars around Rotating Black Holes

Vitor Cardoso, Sayan Chakrabarti, Paolo Pani, Emanuele Berti, and Leonardo Gualtieri

Phys. Rev. Lett. 107, 241101 – Published 7 December 2011

Abstract

We study the coupling of massive scalar fields to matter in orbit around rotating black holes. It is generally expected that orbiting bodies will lose energy in gravitational waves, slowly inspiraling into the black hole. Instead, we show that the coupling of the field to matter leads to a surprising effect: because of superradiance, matter can hover into “floating orbits” for which the net gravitational energy loss at infinity is entirely provided by the black hole’s rotational energy. Orbiting bodies remain floating until they extract sufficient angular momentum from the black hole, or until perturbations or nonlinear effects disrupt the orbit. For slowly rotating and nonrotating black holes floating orbits are unlikely to exist, but resonances at orbital frequencies corresponding to quasibound states of the scalar field can speed up the inspiral, so that the orbiting body sinks. These effects could be a smoking gun of deviations from general relativity.

Received 18 August 2011

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.107.241101

Authors & Affiliations

Vitor Cardoso^1,2, Sayan Chakrabarti¹, Paolo Pani¹, Emanuele Berti^2,3, and Leonardo Gualtieri⁴

¹CENTRA, Departamento de Física, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade Técnica de Lisboa-UTL, Avenida Rovisco Pais 1, 1049 Lisboa, Portugal
²Department of Physics and Astronomy, The University of Mississippi, University, Mississippi 38677, USA
³California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91109, USA
⁴Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Roma “Sapienza” & Sezione, INFN Roma1, Piazzale Aldo Moro 5, 00185, Roma, Italy