Mandar Patil

Kerr Naked Singularities as Particle Accelerators

We investigate here the particle acceleration by Kerr naked singularities. We consider a collision between particles dropped in from infinity at rest, which follow geodesic motion in the equatorial plane, with their angular momenta in an appropriate finite range of values. When an event horizon is absent, an initially infalling particle turns back as an outgoing particle, when it has the angular momentum in an appropriate range of values, which then collides with infalling particles. When the collision takes place close to what would have been the event horizon in the extremal case, the center-of-mass energy of the collision is arbitrarily large, depending on how close the overspinning Kerr geometry is to the extremal case. Thus, the fast rotating Kerr configurations if they exist in nature could provide an excellent cosmic laboratory to probe ultrahigh-energy physics.

Naked singularities as particle accelerators

We investigate here the particle acceleration by naked singularities to arbitrarily high center of mass energies. Recently it has been suggested that black holes could be used as particle accelerators to probe the Planck scale physics. We show that the naked singularities serve the same purpose and probably would do better than their black hole counterparts. We focus on the scenario of a self-similar gravitational collapse starting from a regular initial data, leading to the formation of a globally naked singularity. It is seen that when particles moving along timelike geodesics interact and collide near the Cauchy horizon, the energy of collision in the center of mass frame will be arbitrarily high, thus offering a window to Planck scale physics.

Circular geodesics and accretion disks in the Janis-Newman-Winicour and gamma metric spacetimes

We study here circular timelike geodesics in the Janis-Newman-Winicour and Gamma metric spacetimes which contain a strong curvature naked singularity and reduce to the Schwarzschild metric for a specific value of one of the parameters. We show that for both the metrics the range of allowed parameters can be divided into three regimes where structure of the circular geodesics is qualitatively different. It follows that the properties of the accretion disks around such naked singularities can be significantly different from those of disks around black holes. This adds to previous studies showing that if naked singularities exist in nature, their observational signature would be significantly different from that of the black hole.

High energy particle collisions in superspinning Kerr geometry

We investigate here the particle acceleration and high energy collision in the Kerr geometry containing a naked singularity. We show that the center of mass energy of collision between two particles, dropped in from a finite but arbitrarily large distance along the axis of symmetry is arbitrarily large, provided the deviation of the angular momentum parameter from the mass is very small for the Kerr naked singularity. The collisions considered here are between particles, one of them ingoing and the other one being initially ingoing but which later emerges as an outgoing particle, after it suffers a reflection from a spatial region which has a repulsive gravity in the vicinity of the naked singularity. High energy collisions take place around a region which marks a transition between the attractive and repulsive regimes of gravity. We make a critical comparison between our results and the BSW acceleration mechanism [M. Banados, J. Silk, and S. M. West, Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 111102 (2009).] for extremal Kerr blackholes, and argue that the scenario we give here has certain distinct advantages. If compact objects exist in nature with exterior Kerr superspinning geometry then such high energy collisions would have a significant impact on the physical processes occurring in its surrounding and could possibly lead to their own observational signatures. As an aside we also suggest a curious Gedanken collider physics experiment which could in principle be constructed in this geometry.

Can strong gravitational lensing distinguish naked singularities from black holes

In this paper we study gravitational lensing in the strong field limit from the perspective of cosmic censorship, to investigate whether or not naked singularities, if at all they exist in nature, can be distinguished from black holes. We study the gravitational lensing in the strong field regime in the JMN spacetime, a spherically symmetric geometry that contains a naked singularity and which matches smoothly with Schwarzschild metric beyond a finite radius. This metric is a toy model which was shown recently to be the end state of gravitational collapse. In the presence of the photon sphere gravitational lensing signature of this spacetime is identical to that of Schwarzschild black hole with infinitely many relativistic images and Einstein rings, all of them located beyond a certain critical angle from optic axis and the inner relativistic images all clumped together. However, in the absence of the photon sphere, which is the case for a wide range of parameter values in this spacetime, we show that we get finitely many relativistic images and Einstein rings spaced reasonably apart from one another, some of which can be formed inside the critical angle for the corresponding Schwarzschild black hole. This study suggests that the observation of relativistic images and rings might, in principle, allow us to unravel the existence of the naked singularity in the absence of the photon sphere. The results obtained here are in contrast with the earlier investigation on JNW naked singularities radial caustic was always present in the absence of photon sphere, while it is absent in JMN geometry. We also point out the practical difficulties that might be encountered in the observation of the relativistic images and suggest that new dedicated experiments and techniques must be developed in future for this purpose.

Acceleration of particles in Janis-Newman-Winicour singularities

We examine here the acceleration of particles and high energy collisions in the the Janis-Newman- Winicour (JNW) spacetime, which is an extension of the Schwarzschild geometry when a massless scalar field is included. We show that while the center of mass energy of collisions of particles near the event horizon of a blackhole is not significantly larger than the rest mass of the interacting particles, in an analogous situation, it could be arbitrarily large in the JNWspacetime near the naked singularity. The high energy collisions are seen to be generic in the presence of a photon sphere in the JNW spacetime, whereas an extreme fine-tuning of the angular momentum of the colliding particles is required when the photon sphere is absent. The center of mass energy of collision near the singularity grows slowly for small and extremely large deviations from the Schwarzschild blackhole, but for intermediate strengths of the scalar field it rises moderately fast. As a possible and potentially interesting application, we point out that the presence of such high energy collissions may help the blackhole configurations to be distinguished from a naked singularity.

Ultra-high energy particle collisions in a regular spacetime without blackholes or naked singularities

We investigate here the particle acceleration and collisions with extremely large center of mass energies in a perfectly regular spacetime containing neither singularity nor an event horizon. The ultra-high energy collisions of particles near the event horizon of extremal Kerr blackhole, and also in many other examples of extremal blackholes have been investigated and reported recently. We studied an analogous particle acceleration process in the Kerr and Reissner-Nordstrom spacetimes without horizon, containing naked singularities. Further to this, we show here that the particle acceleration and collision process is in fact independent of blackholes and naked singularities, and can happen in a fully regular spacetime containing neither of these. We derive the conditions on the general static spherically symmetric metric for such a phenomena to happen. We show that in order to have ultra-high energy collisions it is necessary for the norm of the timelike Killing vector to admit a maximum with a vanishingly small but a negative value. This is also a condition implying the presence of a surface with extremely large but nevertheless finite value of the redshift or blueshift. Conditions to have ultrahigh energy collisions and regular center imply the violation of strong energy condition near the center while the weak energy condition is respected in the region around the center. Thus the central region is surrounded by a dark energy fluid. Both the energy conditions are respected at the location where the high energy collisions take place. As a concrete example we then investigate the acceleration process in the spacetime geometry derived by Bardeen which is sourced by a non-liner self-gravitating magnetic monopole.

Distinguishing Kerr naked singularities and black holes using the spin precession of a test gyro in strong gravitational fields

We study here the precession of the spin of a test gyroscope attached to a stationary observer in the Kerr spacetime, specifically, to distinguish naked singularity (NS) from black hole (BH). It was shown recently that for gyros attached to static observers, their precession frequency became arbitrarily large in the limit of approach to the ergosurface. For gyros attached to stationary observers that move with non-zero angular velocity

Time Delay between Relativistic Images as a probe of Cosmic Censorship

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Infinite efficiency of the collisional Penrose process: Can a overspinning Kerr geometry be the source of ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays and neutrinos?

, this divergence at the ergosurface can be avoided. Specifically, for such gyros, the precession frequencies diverge on the event horizon of a BH, but are finite and regular for NS everywhere except at the singularity itself. Therefore a genuine detection of the event horizon becomes possible in this case. We also show that for a near-extremal NS (