Recursive Penrose processes in electrically charged black hole spacetimes: Backreaction and energy extraction
Abstract
We study a recursive Penrose process and the energy extraction for the decay of electrically charged particles in a Reissner-Nordstr\"om black hole spacetime with anti-de Sitter (AdS) asymptotics, incorporating the backreaction on the black hole's mass and charge. A recursive process requires that the decay products are confined in a finite region so that the emitted particles bounce back for further decay. In AdS spacetimes, the confinement arises naturally. Outgoing particles encounter a turning point and are reflected. One may impose a mirror at finite radius, but in AdS, backreaction makes these two confinement methods equivalent. Let be the black hole charge after decays, and define as the index for which the black hole's charge is zero, . For integer the black hole's charge decreases and reaches exactly zero after a finite number of decays, terminating the process. However, the last particle turns back, and encountering zero charge, falls into the hole. The final state is a charged black hole whose charge equals the sum of the original black hole and the initial particle charges. For noninteger, the black hole charge decreases and can be arbitrarily small, but is never zero. The last allowed decay occurs at , where is the greatest integer less than . Any further decay invalidates the approximations, the particles would carry a charge comparable to the black hole mass, transforming the problem into a two-body problem. The would-be subsequent decay would violate cosmic censorship and the process terminates before any inconsistency arises. In the integer and noninteger cases, the system yields a finite energy gain. Backreaction ensures that the process extracts a finite amount of energy. No black hole bomb occurs, the system works at most as an energy factory.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2603.19354,
title = {Recursive Penrose processes in electrically charged black hole spacetimes: Backreaction and energy extraction},
author = {Duarte Feiteira and José P. S. Lemos and Oleg B. Zaslavskii},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.19354},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
25 pages, 13 figures