The Collisional Penrose Process

Abstract

Shortly after the discovery of the Kerr metric in 1963, it was realized that a region existed outside of the black hole's event horizon where no time-like observer could remain stationary. In 1969, Roger Penrose showed that particles within this ergosphere region could possess negative energy, as measured by an observer at infinity. When captured by the horizon, these negative energy particles essentially extract mass and angular momentum from the black hole. While the decay of a single particle within the ergosphere is not a particularly efficient means of energy extraction, the "collision" of multiple particles can reach arbitrarily high center-of-mass energy in the limit of extremal black hole spin. The resulting particles can escape with high efficiency, potentially serving as a probe of high-energy particle physics as well as general relativity. In this paper, we briefly review the history of the field and highlight a specific astrophysical application of the collisional Penrose process: the potential to enhance annihilation of dark matter particles in the vicinity of a supermassive black hole.

26 pages, 18 figures, topical review for GRG

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Cited by in corpus (19)

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• Complete classification of photon escape in the Kerr black hole spacetime
• Penrose process in Reissner-Nordström-AdS black hole spacetimes: Black hole energy factories and black hole bombs
• Extraction of energy from an extremal rotating electrovacuum black hole: Particle collisions in the equatorial plane
• Confined Penrose process with charged particles
• Negative energy states in the Reissner-Nordström metric
• Energy Extraction From Non-Coalescing Black Hole Binaries
• Pure electric Penrose and super-Penrose processes in the flat space-time
• Topical Collection: Testing the Kerr spacetime with gravitational-wave and electromagnetic observations
• Energy extraction from the Reissner-Nordström de Sitter black hole
• Energy extraction in electrostatic extreme binary black holes
• Photon escape in the extremal Kerr black hole spacetime
• Decay of charged particles near naked singularities and super-Penrose process without fine-tuning
• Super-Penrose process for extremal rotating neutral white holes
• Classification of radial Kerr geodesic motion
• New scenarios of high-energy particle collisions near wormholes
• A New Approach for Testing Einstein's Theory of Gravity Close to Rapidly Spinning Black Holes