English

The eye of the storm: A regular Kerr black hole

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2022-03-14 v2

Abstract

We present a highly tractable non-singular modification of the Kerr geometry, dubbed the "eye of the storm" -- a rotating regular black hole with an asymptotically Minkowski core. This is achieved by "exponentially suppressing" the mass parameter in the Kerr spacetime: mm  e/rm\to m \; e^{-\ell/r}. The single parameter \ell quantifies the deviation from the usual Kerr spacetime. Some of the classical energy conditions are globally satisfied, whilst certain choices for \ell force any energy-condition-violating physics into the deep core. The geometry possesses the full "Killing tower'" of principal tensor, Killing--Yano tensor, and nontrivial Killing tensor, with associated Carter constant; hence the Hamilton--Jacobi equations are separable, and the geodesics integrable. The Klein--Gordon equation is also separable on this candidate spacetime. The tightly controlled deviation from Kerr renders the physics extraordinarily tractable when compared with analogous results in the current literature. This spacetime will be amenable to straightforward extraction of astrophysical observables falsifiable/ verifiable by the experimental community.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2111.12329,
  title  = {The eye of the storm: A regular Kerr black hole},
  author = {Alex Simpson and Matt Visser},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2111.12329},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

V1: 27 pages, 71 references. V2: Now 28 pages, 83 references; some discourse added with relevant citations, small physics changes with inclusion of Maxwell separability