Absorptive Effects and Classical Black Hole Scattering

We consider effects of non-uniformity of quasi-spherical small black hole horizons on scattering massless spineless particles in the long-wave approximation. Focusing on 4D flat and AdS neutral black hole backgrounds with conformally spherical geometry of the horizon, we observe the notable differences in compare to the scattering process on the spherically-symmetric black holes. In particular, the absorption cross-section becomes dependent on both, polar and azimuthal, spher...

If one assumes the validity of conventional quantum field theory in the vicinity of the horizon of a black hole, one does not find a quantum mechanical description of the entire black hole that even remotely resembles that of conventional forms of matter; in contrast with matter made out of ordinary particles one finds that, even if embedded in a finite volume, a black hole would be predicted to have a strictly continuous spectrum. Dissatisfied with such a result, which ind...

We consider the effects of off-shell Hawking radiation on scattering processes involving black holes coupled to quantum fields. The focus here is to the case of gravitational scattering of a scalar field mediated by the exchange of virtual Hawking gravitons from a four-dimensional Schwarzschild black hole. Our result is obtained in the context of a worldline effective field theory for the black hole, and is valid in the semi-classical limit where the Schwarzschild radius $r_s...

In this work the worldline quantum field theory (WQFT) approach to computing observables of the classical general relativistic two-body system is presented. Compact bodies such as black holes or neutron stars are described in an effective field theory by worldline fields with spin degrees of freedom efficiently described by anti-commuting Grassmann variables. Novel results of the WQFT include the gravitational bremsstrahlung at second post-Minkowskian order and the impulse an...

We consider the absorption problem for a massless scalar field propagating in static and spherically symmetric black holes of arbitrary dimension endowed with a photon sphere. For this wide class of black holes, we show that the fluctuations of the high-energy absorption cross section are totally and very simply described from the properties (dispersion relation and damping) of the waves trapped near the photon sphere and therefore, in the eikonal regime, from the characteris...

While no-hair theorems forbid isolated black holes from possessing permanent moments beyond their mass, electric charge, and angular momentum, research over the past two decades has demonstrated that a black hole interacting with a time-dependent background scalar field will gain an induced scalar charge. In this paper, we study this phenomenon from an effective field theory (EFT) perspective. We employ a novel approach to constructing the effective point-particle action for ...

We show that low-energy photon scattering from a body with radius R slightly larger than its Schwarzschild radius r_s resembles black-hole absorption. This absorption occurs via capture to one of the many long-lived, densely packed resonances that populate the continuum. The lifetimes and density of these meta-stable states tend to infinity in the limit r_s -> R. We determine the energy averaged cross-section for particle capture into these resonances and show that it is equa...

In this paper we track the non-linear spherical evolution of a massless scalar field onto a Schwarzschild black hole space-time as a first approximation to the accretion of cosmologically motivated classical scalar fields. We perform an analysis related to wave packets described by wave number and width. We study various values of the wave number k, and found that for k = 0 and width packets bigger than the Schwarzschild radius, the absorption is not total. In the cases we st...

An approach to scattering theory in three dimensional AdS spaces is proposed. Firstly we consider the scattering of spinless relativistic particles by a three dimensional extremal black hole and compute the absorption cross section $\sigma_{abs} =J_{abs}/J_{\infty}$ without using {\it in} and {\it out} states. Secondly, we posit a reciprocal space ${\cal H}$ where {\it in} and {\it out} states and the scattering amplitude is defined as in usual scattering theory. We show that...

We discuss the absorption cross section for the minimally-coupled massless scalar field into a stationary and circularly symmetric black hole with nonzero angular velocity in four or higher dimensions. In particular, we show that it equals the horizon area in the zero-frequency limit provided that the solution of the scalar field equation with an incident monochromatic plane wave converges pointwise to a smooth time-independent solution outside the black hole and on the futur...