Constraints on Kalb-Ramond Gravity from EHT Observations of Rotating Black Holes in Traceless Conformal Electrodynamics
Abstract
We present a phenomenological study of rotating, charged black holes in Einstein gravity coupled to a traceless (conformal) matter sector formed by ModMax nonlinear electrodynamics and a Kalb-Ramond two-form that spontaneously breaks local Lorentz symmetry. Starting from a family of obtained static, Schwarzschild-like solutions with a traceless Kalb-Ramond sector, we construct the stationary, axisymmetric counterpart via the Newman-Janis algorithm. The resulting Newman-Kerr-like metric depends on four intrinsic parameters: the electric charge , the ModMax nonlinearity , the Lorentz-violation amplitude and the spin . We analyze horizon structure and separatrices in parameter space, derive the null geodesic equations and obtain the photon capture boundary that defines the black hole shadow. Using ray-tracing, we compute shadow silhouettes and a suite of shadow observables (areal radius, characteristic radius , distortion , oblateness ) and show how and produce qualitatively distinct effects: acts as a screening factor for the electromagnetic imprint, while introduces angular-dependent metric rescalings that deform shadow shape beyond simple size rescaling. We confront model predictions with EHT angular-radius measurements for M87 and Sgr A and derive conservative bounds on the combinations of . Our results identify an effective charge combination and demonstrate that modest remains compatible with current EHT images while large is progressively disfavored.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2509.16782,
title = {Constraints on Kalb-Ramond Gravity from EHT Observations of Rotating Black Holes in Traceless Conformal Electrodynamics},
author = {Yassine Sekhmani and Kuantay Boshkayev and Mustapha Azreg-Aïnou and Sunil K. Maurya and Mohamed Altanji and Ainur Urazalina},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.16782},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
28 pages, 12 figures; 2 table