English

Accretion of multipolar massive complex scalar field packets by a Schwarzschild black hole

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2026-07-21 v1 Astrophysics of Galaxies

Abstract

We study the finite-time accretion of complex massive scalar wave packets by a Schwarzschild black hole in the test-field regime, with parameters motivated by ultralight fuzzy dark matter around supermassive black holes. Our goal is to determine how the scalar content of a localized configuration is redistributed after interacting with the black hole, and which spectral and multipolar components are more efficiently absorbed. We decompose the Klein--Gordon field into independent multipolar sectors and evolve nearly monochromatic Gaussian packets mode by mode, reducing the problem to a set of 1+1 dimensional evolutions. Accretion is quantified with the flux of the conserved Noether current through the horizon surface, providing a direct measure of the scalar charge absorbed by the black hole. For a carrier radial wavenumber k0k_0 and multipole index \ell, we construct accretion-efficiency maps in the (k0,)(k_0,\ell) plane that contain the fraction of accreted modal charge. These maps exhibit a transition between inefficient, partial, and efficient accretion regimes, which we relate to the structure of an effective potential. We show that the process is controlled by the ratio between the Schwarzschild radius RsR_s and the reduced Compton wavelength \lambdabarC\lambdabar_C. For Rs\lambdabarCR_s \lesssim \lambdabar_C, the transition is broad and dominated by the angular momentum barrier, while for Rs>\lambdabarCR_s > \lambdabar_C it sharpens across a narrower range of k0k_0 and a partial-accretion floor emerges at low k0k_0. These results provide a time-domain, Noether-charge-based classification of black hole accretion for massive scalar wave packets.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.18920,
  title  = {Accretion of multipolar massive complex scalar field packets by a Schwarzschild black hole},
  author = {Flavio Rosales-Infante and Ivan Alvarez-Rios and Francisco S. Guzman},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.18920},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

19 pages, 11 figures. Submitted to Phys. Rev. D