English

MOTS in Schwarzschild: multiple self-intersections and extreme mass ratio mergers

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2020-09-11 v3

Abstract

We study the open and closed axisymmetric marginally outer trapped surfaces contained in leaves of constant Painlev\'e-Gullstrand time for Schwarzschild spacetimes. We identify a family of closed MOTS in the black hole interior characterized by an arbitrary number of self-intersections. This suggests that the self-intersecting behaviour reported in [Phys.Rev.D 100, 084044 (2019)] may be a far more generic phenomenon than expected. We also consider open surfaces, finding that their behaviour is highly constrained but includes surfaces with multiple self-intersections inside the horizon. We argue that the behaviour of open MOTS identifies and constrains the possible local behaviour of MOTS during extreme mass ratio mergers.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2005.05350,
  title  = {MOTS in Schwarzschild: multiple self-intersections and extreme mass ratio mergers},
  author = {Ivan Booth and Robie Hennigar and Saikat Mondal},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2005.05350},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

20 pages, 20 figures. V2: Two paragraphs added to emphasize that results for PG slicings are expected to be more generic than those for a static slicing. Otherwise small changes in wording. Version submitted to journal, V3: Title and abstract changed to emphasize main results. Typos corrected in text. Published version

R2 v1 2026-06-23T15:28:08.333Z