paper

Explosion and final state of an unstable Reissner-Nordstrom black hole

arXiv:1512.05358 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.141101

Abstract

A Reissner-Nordström black hole (BH) is superradiantly unstable against spherical perturbations of a charged scalar field, enclosed in a cavity, with frequency lower than a critical value. We use numerical relativity techniques to follow the development of this unstable system -- dubbed a charged BH bomb -- into the non-linear regime, solving the full Einstein--Maxwell--Klein-Gordon equations, in spherical symmetry. We show that: the process stops before all the charge is extracted from the BH; the system settles down into a hairy BH: a charged horizon in equilibrium with a scalar field condensate, whose phase is oscillating at the (final) critical frequency. For low scalar field charge, , the final state is approached smoothly and monotonically. For large , however, the energy extraction overshoots and an explosive phenomenon, akin to a , pushes some energy back into the BH. The charge extraction, by contrast, does not reverse.

5 pages, 4 figures; v2: 8 pages, including Supplemental Material; matches published version in Phys. Rev. Lett.; title changed

References in corpus (10)

Cited by in corpus (131)