Near-Horizon Polarization as a Diagnostic of Black Hole Spacetime
Abstract
A key challenge in imaging supermassive black holes is disentangling gravitational effects from plasma physics in order to accurately determine spacetime properties, particularly black hole spin. In this Letter, we present a fully covariant and rigorous analysis of the synchrotron emission from accreting plasma in the equatorial plane in the stationary, axisymmetric, high-conductivity regime, and identify--for the first time--a distinctive near-horizon polarization pattern that remains robust across different flow structures. This pattern arises from strong frame dragging near the event horizon, which induces a degeneracy among plasma flow and magnetic field configurations, yielding a polarization signature determined solely by the spacetime geometry and the observer's inclination. The near-horizon polarization thus offers a clean and precise probe of black hole spin and other fundamental parameters. If future space-based millimeter VLBI observations can resolve synchrotron emission originating within approximately 1 of the event horizon radius in M87* or Sgr A*, this universal polarization pattern may become observable.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2409.07248,
title = {Near-Horizon Polarization as a Diagnostic of Black Hole Spacetime},
author = {Yehui Hou and Jiewei Huang and Minyong Guo and Yosuke Mizuno and Bin Chen},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.07248},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
19 pages, 8 figures, accepted by ApJL