On the use of multipole expansion in time evolution of nonlinear dynamical systems and some surprises related to superradiance

Abstract

A new numerical method is introduced to study the problem of time evolution of generic non-linear dynamical systems in four-dimensional spacetimes.It is assumed that the time level surfaces are foliated by a one-parameter family of codimension two compact surfaces with no boundary and which are conformal to a Riemannian manifold C .The method is based on the use of a multipole expansion determined uniquely by the induced metric structure on C .The approach is fully spectral-i.e. it avoids pointwise evaluations of the basic variables-in the angular directions.Instead, Gaunt coefficients as matrix elements are used to evaluate multilinear expressions.The dynamics in the complementary 1+1 Lorentzian spacetime is followed by making use of a fourth order finite differencing scheme.In handling the pertinent 1+1 transverse degrees of freedom the techniques of adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) is also applied.In checking the reliability and effectiveness of the introduced new method the evolution of a massless scalar field on a fixed Kerr spacetime is investigated.In particular, the angular distribution of the evolving field in superradiant scattering is studied.The primary aim was to check the validity of some of the recent arguments claiming that the Penrose process, or its field theoretical correspondencesuperradiance-does play crucial role in jet formation in black hole spacetimes while matter accretes onto the central object.Our findings appear to be on contrary to these claims as the angular dependence of superradiant scattering of massless scalar fields does not show any preference of the axis of rotation.In addition, the characteristic properties of superradiance in case of a massless scalar field was also investigated.On contrary to the general expectations we found that by an incident wave packet, which had been tuned to be maximally superradiant, the acquired extra energy in the scattering process must be less then 0.1% of the energy sent in.It was found that instead of the occurrence of anticipated scale of energy extraction from black hole the to be superradiant part of the incident wave packet fail to reach the ergoregion rather it suffers a nearly perfect reflection which appears to be an interesting phenomenon.

Locations

• Classical and Quantum Gravity - View
• arXiv (Cornell University) - View - PDF
• International Linear Collider - View - PDF
• DataCite API - View