English

The essence of the Blandford-Znajek process

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2018-03-30 v3 High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

From a spacetime perspective, the dynamics of magnetic field lines of force-free electromagnetic fields can be rewritten into a quite similar form for the dynamics of strings, i.e., dynamics of "field sheets". Using this formalism, we explicitly show that the field sheets of stationary and axisymmetric force-free electromagnetic fields have identical intrinsic properties to the world sheets of rigidly rotating Nambu-Goto strings. Thus, we conclude that the Blandford-Znajek process is kinematically identical to an energy-extraction mechanism by the Nambu-Goto string with an effective magnetic tension.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1710.09152,
  title  = {The essence of the Blandford-Znajek process},
  author = {Shunichiro Kinoshita and Takahisa Igata},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1710.09152},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

15 pages, 3 figures; v2: references added; v3: published version in PTEP