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Published June 15, 2012 | Published
Journal Article Open

Collisions of charged black holes

Abstract

We perform fully nonlinear numerical simulations of charged-black-hole collisions, described by the Einstein-Maxwell equations, and contrast the results against analytic expectations. We focus on head-on collisions of nonspinning black holes, starting from rest and with the same charge-to-mass ratio, Q/M. The addition of charge to black holes introduces a new interesting channel of radiation and dynamics, most of which seem to be captured by Newtonian dynamics and flat-space intuition. The waveforms can be qualitatively described in terms of three stages: (i) an infall phase prior to the formation of a common apparent horizon; (ii) a nonlinear merger phase that corresponds to a peak in gravitational and electromagnetic energy; (iii) the ringdown marked by an oscillatory pattern with exponentially decaying amplitude and characteristic frequencies that are in good agreement with perturbative predictions. We observe that the amount of gravitational-wave energy generated throughout the collision decreases by about 3 orders of magnitude as the charge-to-mass ratio Q/M is increased from 0 to 0.98. We interpret this decrease as a consequence of the smaller accelerations present for larger values of the charge. In contrast, the ratio of energy carried by electromagnetic to gravitational radiation increases, reaching about 22% for the maximum Q/M ratio explored, which is in good agreement with analytic predictions.

Additional Information

© 2012 American Physical Society. Received 13 May 2012; published 26 June 2012. W e are indebted to Leonardo Gualtieri, Steve Giddings, and Emanuele Berti for fruitful discussions on this topic. We further thank the anonymous referee for suggesting the calculation of the charge-to-mass ratio of the merged hole, in particular, in the near extremal limit. M. Z. would like to thank the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics for its hospitality, through the Visiting Graduate Fellows program, where this work was done. The authors thank the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics at Kyoto University, where parts of this work were completed during the YITP-T-11-08 on ''Recent advances in numerical and analytical methods for black hole dynamics.'' M. Z. is funded by FCT through Grant No. SFRH/BD/43558/ 2008. U. S. acknowledges support from the Ramo´n y Cajal Programme and Grant No. FIS2011-30145-C03-03 of the Ministry of Education and Science of Spain, the NSF TeraGrid and XSEDE Grant No. PHY-090003, RES Grants No. AECT-2012-1-0008 and No. AECT-2011-3-0007 through the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, and CESGA Grants No. ICTS-200 and No. ICTS-221. This work was supported by the DyBHo–256667 ERC Starting Grant, the CBHEO–293412 FP7-PEOPLE-2011-CIG Grant, the NRHEP–295189 FP7-PEOPLE-2011-IRSES Grant, and by FCT–Portugal through Projects No. PTDC/ FIS/098025/2008, No. PTDC/FIS/098032/2008, No. PTDC/ FIS/116625/2010, and No. CERN/FP/116341/2010, the Sherman Fairchild Foundation to Caltech, as well as NSERC through a Discover Grant and CIFAR. Research at Perimeter Institute is supported through Industry Canada and by the Province of Ontario through the Ministry of Research & Innovation. Computations were performed on the Blafis Cluster at Aveiro University, the Milipeia in Coimbra, the Lage Cluster at Centro de Fı´sica do Porto, the Bifi Cluster of the University of Zaragoza, the CESGA Cluster Finis Terrae, NICS Kraken, and the SDSC Cluster Trestles.

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August 19, 2023
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