English

Kerr black holes as accelerators of spinning test particles

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2016-05-04 v2

Abstract

It has been shown that ultraenergetic collisions can occur near the horizon of an extremal Kerr black hole. Previous studies mainly focused on geodesic motions of particles. In this paper, we consider spinning test particles whose orbits are non-geodesic. By employing the Mathisson-Papapetrou-Dixon equation, we find the critical angular momentum satisfies J=2EJ=2E for extremal Kerr black holes. Although the conserved angular momentum JJ and energy EE have been redefined in the presence of spin, the critical condition remains the same form. If a particle with this angular momentum collides with another particle arbitrarily close to the horizon of the black hole, the center-of-mass energy can be arbitrarily high. We also prove that arbitrarily high energies cannot be obtained for spinning particles near the horizons of non-extremal Kerr black holes.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1602.08679,
  title  = {Kerr black holes as accelerators of spinning test particles},
  author = {Minyong Guo and Sijie Gao},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1602.08679},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

11 pages, no figure; matches version published in PRD