Hidden Momentum and Black Hole Kicks

Abstract

A stationary magnetic dipole immersed in an electric field carries "hidden" mechanical momentum. However, the fate of this momentum if the fields are turned off is unclear. We consider a charge-and-dipole hidden momentum configuration, and turn off the fields by collapsing a null shell onto the system, forming a black hole. In numerical calculations we find that the black hole receives a kick corresponding to 0.1% of the initial stored momentum. When extrapolated to apply to purely gravitational phenomena, this efficiency suggests a role for the hidden momentum kick mechanism in generating the binary black hole "superkicks" observed in numerical simulations of Einstein's equation.

matches published version

References in corpus (4)

• Total recoil: the maximum kick from nonspinning black-hole binary inspiral
• Scalar self-force on eccentric geodesics in Schwarzschild spacetime: a time-domain computation
• Bobbing and Kicks in Electromagnetism and Gravity
• Superkicks in ultrarelativistic encounters of spinning black holes

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Center of mass, spin supplementary conditions, and the momentum of spinning particles
• Spacetime dynamics of spinning particles - exact electromagnetic analogies
• Universal features of gravitational waves emitted by superkick binary black hole systems
• Spinning particles in vacuum spacetimes of different curvature types