TY - JOUR

T1 - Collisions of oppositely charged black holes

AU - Zilhao, Miguel

AU - Cardoso, Vitor

AU - Herdeiro, Carlos

AU - Lehner, Luis

AU - Sperhake, Ulrich

PY - 2014/2/11

Y1 - 2014/2/11

N2 - The first fully nonlinear numerical simulations of colliding charged black holes in D = 4 Einstein-Maxwell theory were recently reported [Zilhao et al., Phys. Rev. D 85, 124062 (2012)]. These collisions were performed for black holes with equal charge-to-mass ratio, for which initial data can be found in closed analytic form. Here we generalize the study of collisions of charged black holes to the case of unequal charge-to-mass ratios. We focus on oppositely charged black holes, as to maximize acceleration-dependent effects. As vertical bar Q vertical bar/M increases from 0 to 0.99, we observe that the gravitational radiation emitted increases by a factor of similar to 2.7; the electromagnetic radiation emission becomes dominant for vertical bar Q vertical bar/M greater than or similar to 0.37 and at vertical bar Q vertical bar/M = 0.99 is larger, by a factor of similar to 5.8, than its gravitational counterpart. We observe that these numerical results exhibit a precise and simple scaling with the charge. Furthermore, we show that the results from the numerical simulations are qualitatively captured by a simple analytic model that computes the electromagnetic dipolar radiation and the gravitational quadrupolar radiation of two nonrelativistic interacting particles in Minkowski spacetime.

AB - The first fully nonlinear numerical simulations of colliding charged black holes in D = 4 Einstein-Maxwell theory were recently reported [Zilhao et al., Phys. Rev. D 85, 124062 (2012)]. These collisions were performed for black holes with equal charge-to-mass ratio, for which initial data can be found in closed analytic form. Here we generalize the study of collisions of charged black holes to the case of unequal charge-to-mass ratios. We focus on oppositely charged black holes, as to maximize acceleration-dependent effects. As vertical bar Q vertical bar/M increases from 0 to 0.99, we observe that the gravitational radiation emitted increases by a factor of similar to 2.7; the electromagnetic radiation emission becomes dominant for vertical bar Q vertical bar/M greater than or similar to 0.37 and at vertical bar Q vertical bar/M = 0.99 is larger, by a factor of similar to 5.8, than its gravitational counterpart. We observe that these numerical results exhibit a precise and simple scaling with the charge. Furthermore, we show that the results from the numerical simulations are qualitatively captured by a simple analytic model that computes the electromagnetic dipolar radiation and the gravitational quadrupolar radiation of two nonrelativistic interacting particles in Minkowski spacetime.

KW - GRAVITATIONAL-RADIATION

KW - ENERGY

U2 - 10.1103/PhysRevD.89.044008

DO - 10.1103/PhysRevD.89.044008

M3 - Journal article

VL - 89

JO - Physical Review D

JF - Physical Review D

SN - 2470-0010

IS - 4

M1 - 044008

ER -