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Physical Review D

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Collisions of oppositely charged black holes

Miguel Zilhão^1,*, Vitor Cardoso^2,3, Carlos Herdeiro⁴, Luis Lehner³, and Ulrich Sperhake^5,6,7

¹Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation and School of Mathematical Sciences, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, New York 14623, USA
²CENTRA, Departamento de Física, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, Avenida Rovisco Pais 1, 1049 Lisboa, Portugal
³Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Waterloo, Ontario N2L 2Y5, Canada
⁴Departamento de Física da Universidade de Aveiro and I3N, Campus de Santiago, 3810-183 Aveiro, Portugal
⁵Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, Centre for Mathematical Sciences, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB3 0WA, United Kingdom
⁶Theoretical Astrophysics 350-17, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91125, USA
⁷Department of Physics and Astronomy, The University of Mississippi, University, Mississippi 38677, USA

^*mzilhao@astro.rit.edu

Phys. Rev. D 89, 044008 – Published 11 February, 2014

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.89.044008

Abstract

The first fully nonlinear numerical simulations of colliding charged black holes in $D = 4$ Einstein-Maxwell theory were recently reported [Zilhão 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 $| Q | / M$ increases from 0 to 0.99, we observe that the gravitational radiation emitted increases by a factor of $\sim 2.7$ ; the electromagnetic radiation emission becomes dominant for $| Q | / M ≳ 0.37$ and at $| Q | / M = 0.99$ is larger, by a factor of $\sim 5.8$ , 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.

Article Text

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