Black holes with surrounding matter and rainbow scattering

Abstract

The scattering of light by water droplets can produce one of the most beautiful phenomena in Nature: the rainbow. This optical phenomenon has analogues in molecular, atomic and nuclear physics. Recently, rainbow scattering has been shown to arise from the gravitational interaction of a scalar field with a compact horizonless object. We show that rainbow scattering can also occur in the background of a black hole with surrounding matter. We study the scattering of null geodesics and planar massless scalar waves by Schwarzschild black holes surrounded by a thin spherical shell of matter. We explore various configurations of this system, analyzing changes in mass fraction and radius of the shell. We show that the deflection function can present stationary points, what leads to rainbow scattering. We analyze the large-angle scattered amplitude as a function of the shell's parameters, showing that it presents a non-monotonic behavior.

9 pages, 11 figures, matches published version in PRD

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• Observation of a new particle in the search for the Standard Model Higgs boson with the ATLAS detector at the LHC
• Can environmental effects spoil precision gravitational-wave astrophysics?
• Scattering and absorption of gravitational plane waves by rotating black holes
• Fermion scattering by a Schwarzschild black hole
• Electromagnetic wave scattering by Schwarzschild black holes
• Inferring black hole charge from backscattered electromagnetic radiation
• Scattering of massless fermions by Schwarzschild and Reissner-Nordström black holes

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Tidal forces in dirty black hole spacetimes
• Rainbow scattering of gravitational plane waves by a compact body
• On-axis scattering of scalar fields by charged rotating black holes
• Series reduction method for scattering of planar waves by Kerr-Newman black holes
• Particle production, absorption, scattering, and geodesics in a Schwarzschild-Hernquist black hole