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The collisional Penrose process

General Relativity and Gravitation volume 50, Article number: 77 (2018) Cite this article

Abstract

Shortly after the discovery of the Kerr metric in 1963, it was realized that a region existed outside of the black hole’s event horizon where no time-like observer could remain stationary. In 1969, Roger Penrose showed that particles within this ergosphere region could possess negative energy, as measured by an observer at infinity. When captured by the horizon, these negative energy particles essentially extract mass and angular momentum from the black hole. While the decay of a single particle within the ergosphere is not a particularly efficient means of energy extraction, the collision of multiple particles can reach arbitrarily high center-of-mass energy in the limit of extremal black hole spin. The resulting particles can escape with high efficiency, potentially serving as a probe of high-energy particle physics as well as general relativity. In this paper, we briefly review the history of the field and highlight a specific astrophysical application of the collisional Penrose process: the potential to enhance annihilation of dark matter particles in the vicinity of a supermassive black hole.

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Notes

  1. A leading theory for magnetically powered jets is the Blandford–Znajek process [50], which does extract energy from the spin of the black hole, but not through a particle-based Penrose process.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Alessandra Buonanno, Francesc Ferrer, Ted Jacobson, Henric Krawczynski, Tzvi Piran, Laleh Sadeghian, and Joe Silk for helpful comments and discussion. A special thanks to the editor of this Topical Collection, Emanuele Berti, for his encouragement and patience.

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    Jeremy D. Schnittman

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Correspondence to Jeremy D. Schnittman.

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This article belongs to the Topical Collection: Testing the Kerr spacetime with gravitational-wave and electromagnetic observations.

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Schnittman, J.D. The collisional Penrose process. Gen Relativ Gravit 50, 77 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10714-018-2373-5

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Keywords

  • Black holes
  • Ergosphere
  • Kerr metric