Carolina L. Benone

Acoustic clouds: Standing sound waves around a black hole analogue

Under certain conditions sound waves in fluids experience an acoustic horizon with analogue properties to those of a black hole event horizon. In particular, a draining bathtub-like model can give rise to a rotating acoustic horizon and hence a rotating black hole (acoustic) analogue. We show that sound waves, when enclosed in a cylindrical cavity, can form stationary waves around such rotating acoustic holes. These acoustic perturbations display similar properties to the scalar clouds that have been studied around Kerr and Kerr-Newman black holes; thus they are dubbed acoustic clouds. We make the comparison between scalar clouds around Kerr black holes and acoustic clouds around the draining bathtub explicit by studying also the properties of scalar clouds around Kerr black holes enclosed in a cavity. Acoustic clouds suggest the possibility of testing, experimentally, the existence and properties of black hole clouds, using analog models.

Stationary bound states of massless scalar fields around black holes and black hole analogues

We discuss stationary bound states, a.k.a. clouds, for a massless test scalar field around Kerr black holes (BHs) and spinning acoustic BH analogues. In view of the absence of a mass term, the trapping is achieved via enclosing the BH — scalar field system in a cavity and imposing Dirichlet or Neumann boundary conditions. We discuss the variation of these bounds states with the discrete parameters that label them, as well as their spatial distribution, complementing results in our previous work [C. L. Benone, L. C. B. Crispino, C. Herdeiro and E. Radu, Phys. Rev. D91 (2015) 104038].

Scalar absorption by charged rotating black holes

We compute numerically the absorption cross section of planar massless scalar waves impinging upon a Kerr-Newman black hole with different incidence angles. We investigate the influence of the black hole electric charge and angular momentum in the absorption spectrum, comparing our numerical computations with analytical results for the limits of high and low frequency.

Synchronized stationary clouds in a static fluid

Abstract The existence of stationary bound states for the hydrodynamic velocity field between two concentric cylinders is established. We argue that rotational motion, together with a trapping mechanism for the associated field, is sufficient to mitigate energy dissipation between the cylinders, thus allowing the existence of infinitely long lived modes, which we dub stationary clouds . We demonstrate the existence of such stationary clouds for sound and surface waves when the fluid is static and the internal cylinder rotates with constant angular velocity Ω. These setups provide a unique opportunity for the first experimental observation of synchronized stationary clouds. As in the case of bosonic fields around rotating black holes and black hole analogues, the existence of these clouds relies on a synchronization condition between Ω and the angular phase velocity of the cloud.

Stationary configurations around charged rotating black holes

Scalar fields can form real bound states around black holes for a specific frequency. In this work, we review the case of a charged and massive scalar field around a charged rotating black hole, in order to find these bound states. We analyze the behavior of these solutions for different parameters and also comment on analytic solutions for certain regimes.