Turbulent Black Holes

Abstract

We show that rapidly-spinning black holes can display turbulent gravitational behavior which is mediated by a new type of parametric instability. This instability transfers energy from higher temporal and azimuthal spatial frequencies to lower frequencies--- a phenomenon reminiscent of the inverse energy cascade displayed by 2+1-dimensional turbulent fluids. Our finding reveals a path towards gravitational turbulence for perturbations of rapidly-spinning black holes, and provides the first evidence for gravitational turbulence in an asymptotically flat spacetime. Interestingly, this finding predicts observable gravitational wave signatures from such phenomena in black hole binaries with high spins and gives a gravitational description of turbulence relevant to the fluid-gravity duality.

5+3 pages, 2 figures, corrected an error in the treatment of the driving mode; example and figures changed, discussion added

References in corpus (6)

• LIGO: The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory
• Nonlinear Fluid Dynamics from Gravity
• Slow relaxation of rapidly rotating black holes
• Branching of quasinormal modes for nearly extremal Kerr black holes
• On finding fields and self-force in a gauge appropriate to separable wave equations
• Maximum black-hole spin from quasi-circular binary mergers

Cited by in corpus (12)

• Fixing extensions to General Relativity in the non-linear regime
• Horizon Instability of Extremal Kerr Black Holes: Nonaxisymmetric Modes and Enhanced Growth Rate
• Transient Instability of Rapidly Rotating Black Holes
• Testing the nonlinear stability of Kerr-Newman black holes
• Holographic Isotropisation in Gauss-Bonnet Gravity
• Holography, Hydrodynamization and Heavy-Ion Collisions
• Quasinormal Modes Beyond Kerr
• Evolutions of Nearly Maximally Spinning Black Hole Binaries Using the Moving Puncture Approach
• Coupled Oscillator Model for Nonlinear Gravitational Perturbations
• Gravitational waves from a plunge into a nearly extremal Kerr black hole
• Black Hole Squeezers
• On the fractal dimension of turbulent black holes