Relativistic dust accretion of charged particles in Kerr-Newman spacetime

• Published in: Physical review. D 2017-09, Vol.96 (6), Article 063015
• Main Authors: Schroven, Kris, Hackmann, Eva, Lämmerzahl, Claus
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Accretion disks; Charged particles; Collisionless plasmas; Electromagnetic fields; Mathematical models; Plasma; Rotating plasmas; Rotating spheres; Rotation; Spherical shells
• ISSN: 2470-0010; 2470-0029
• DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.96.063015

We describe a new analytical model for the accretion of particles from a rotating and charged spherical shell of dilute collisionless plasma onto a rotating and charged black hole. By assuming a continuous injection of particles at the spherical shell and by treating the black hole and a featureless accretion disk located in the equatorial plane as passive sinks of particles, we build a stationary accretion model. This may then serve as a toy model for plasma feeding an accretion disk around a charged and rotating black hole. Therefore, our new model is a direct generalization of the analytical accretion model introduced by E. Tejeda, P. A. Taylor, and J. C. Miller [Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 429, 925 (2013)]. We use our generalized model to analyze the influence of a net charge of the black hole, which will in general be very small, on the accretion of plasma. Within the assumptions of our model we demonstrate that already a vanishingly small charge of the black hole may in general still have a non-negligible effect on the motion of the plasma, as long as the electromagnetic field of the plasma is still negligible. Furthermore, we argue that the inner and outer edges of the forming accretion disk strongly depend on the charge of the accreted plasma. The resulting possible configurations of accretion disks are analyzed in detail.