Spinning Black Holes as Particle Accelerators

It has been suggested that rotating black holes could serve as particle colliders with arbitrarily high center-of-mass energy. Astrophysical limitations on the maximal spin, back-reaction effects and sensitivity to the initial conditions impose severe limits on the likelihood of such collisions.

On the basis of the Kerr metric as a model for a spinning black hole accreting test particles from rest at infinity, I show that the center-of-mass energy for a pair of colliding particles is generically divergent at the inner horizon. This shows that not only are classical black holes internally unstable, but also that Planck-scale physics is a characteristic feature within black holes at scales much larger that the Planck length. The novel feature of the divergence discusse...

Rapidly rotating Kerr black holes can accelerate particles to arbitrarily high energy if the angular momentum of the particle is fine-tuned to some critical value. This phenomenon is robust as it is founded on the basic properties of geodesic orbits around a near-extremal Kerr black hole. On the other hand, the maximum energy of the acceleration is subjected to several physical effects. There is convincing evidence that the particle acceleration to arbitrarily high energy is ...

It is known that the center-of-mass energy of the collision of two massive particles following geodesics around a black hole presents a maximum. The maximum energy increases when the black hole is endowed with spin, and for a maximally rotating hole this energy blows up, offering, in principle, a unique probe of fundamental physics. This work extends the latter studies by considering that the colliding particles possess intrinsic angular momentum (spin), described by the Hans...

A number of long-standing puzzles, such as the origin of ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays, could perhaps be solved if we found a mechanism for effectively transferring energy from black holes to particles and, correspondingly, accelerating the latter to (unboundedly, as long as we neglect the back reaction) large velocities. As of today the only such candidate mechanism in the case of the non-extreme Kerr black hole is colliding a particle that freely falls from infinity with a p...

It has recently been pointed out that the spinning Kerr black hole with maximal spin could act as a particle collider with arbitrarily high center-of-mass energy. In this paper, we will extend the result to the charged spinning black hole, the Kerr-Newman black hole. The center-of-mass energy of collision for two uncharged particles falling freely from rest at infinity depends not only on the spin $a$ but also on the charge $Q$ of the black hole. We find that an unlimited cen...

It is well known that some black holes can act as accelerators for particles without spin. Recently, there are some works considering collision of two spinning particles in the background of Schwarzschild and Kerr black holes and it was shown that {the center-of-mass energy of the test particles is related to the spin}. In this paper we extend the results to some more general cases. We consider Kerr-Newman black holes as accelerators for spinning particles. We derive the cent...

It has been shown that ultraenergetic collisions can occur near the horizon of an extremal Kerr black hole. Previous studies mainly focused on geodesic motions of particles. In this paper, we consider spinning test particles whose orbits are non-geodesic. By employing the Mathisson-Papapetrou-Dixon equation, we find the critical angular momentum satisfies $J=2E$ for extremal Kerr black holes. Although the conserved angular momentum $J$ and energy $E$ have been redefined in th...

We study the spacetime noncommutative effect on black hole as particle accelerators and, find that particle falling from infinity with zero velocity cannot collide with unbound energy when the noncommutative Kerr black hole is exactly extremal. Our results also show that the bigger of the spinning black hole's mass is, the higher of center of mass energy that the particles obtain. For small and medium noncommutative Schwarzschild black hole, the collision energy depends on th...

We show that intermediate mass black holes conjectured to be the early precursors of supermassive black holes and surrounded by relic cold dark matter density spikes can act as particle accelerators with collisions, in principle, at arbitrarily high centre of mass energies in the case of Kerr black holes. While the ejecta from such interactions will be highly redshifted, we may anticipate the possibility of a unique probe of Planck-scale physics.