Extracting Energy from Black Hole through Transition Region

In this lecture I give an introduction to the rotational energy extraction of black holes by the electromagnetic Blandford-Znajek process and the generation of relativistic jets. After some basic material on the electrodynamics of black hole magnetospheres, we derive the most important results of Blandford and Znajek by making use of Kerr-Schild coordinates, which are regular on the horizon. In a final part we briefly describe results of recent numerical simulations of accret...

We elucidate the `right' process for energy extraction from Kerr black holes through `FFDE' magnetospheres, free from causality violation. It is shown that the magnetosphere of a Kerr black hole possesses the double-structure, consisting of the inner and outer magnetospheres with the pair-creation gap between them and with respective unipolar batteries at the inner and outer surfaces of the gap.

Rotating black holes are the most powerful source of energy in the known universe, and are the cause of some of the most spectacular and extreme astronomical phenomena. The goal of this article is to analyze in simple terms the physics of energy extraction in rotating black holes. Specifically, the source of said energy, the efficiency of the energy extraction process, and some specific mechanisms that allow said extraction are analyzed. The article is intended primarily for ...

Magnetic reconnection process in the ergosphere is investigated for a relativistic plasma around a rotating non-Kerr black hole. For a rotating non-Kerr black hole immersed in magnetic field generated by an externally material, anti-parallel magnetic field line could form in the ergosphere due to the frame dragging. Therefore, magnetic reconnection could occur in the ergosphere. Such magnetic reconnection may generate negative energy at infinity by redistributing the angular ...

The Comisso-Asenjo mechanism is a novel mechanism proposed recently to extract energy from black holes through magnetic reconnection of the surrounding charged plasma, in which the magnetic field plays a crucial role. In this work, we revisit this process by taking into account the backreaction of the magnetic field on the black hole's geometry. We employ the Kerr-Melvin metric to describe the local near-horizon geometry of the magnetized black hole. By analyzing the circular...

In this paper, we show that a rigidly rotating string can extract the rotational energy from a rotating black hole. We consider Nambu-Goto strings stationary with respect to a corotating Killing vector with an uniform angular velocity $\omega$ in the Kerr spacetime. We show that a necessary condition of the energy-extraction process is that an effective horizon on the string world sheet, which corresponds to the inner light surface, is inside the ergosphere of the Kerr black ...

If a magnetically dominated magnetosphere is to extract a black hole's rotational energy and transmit it to distant regions, then the inner light surface of that magnetosphere must lie within the ergoregion. That inner light surface condition limits the angular velocity of magnetic field lines. We take the distribution of magnetic field line angular velocity on the horizon to be a useful proxy for inner light surface location and study how different distributions affect the s...

We investigate mechanisms of energy extraction from a rotating black hole in terms of negative energy-at-infinity. In addition to the Penrose process through particle fission, the Blandford-Znajek mechanism by magnetic tension, and the magnetohydrodynamic Penrose process, we examine energy extraction from a black hole caused by magnetic reconnection in the ergosphere. The reconnection redistributes the angular momentum efficiently to yield the negative energy-atinfinity. We d...

We study the energetics of a black hole-accretion disk system with magnetic connection: a Keplerian disk is connected to a Kerr black hole by a large-scale magnetic field going through the transition region. We assume that the magnetic field is locked to the inner boundary of the disk and corotates with the inner boundary, the accretion rate is low but the accretion from the disk can still provide enough amount of cold plasma particles in the transition region so that the mag...

We study electromagnetic radiation reaction on a charged particle around a weakly magnetized Kerr black hole. We solve numerically the Teukolsky equation to find energy fluxes in electromagnetic radiation at the horizon and at spatial infinity. We also employ analytical methods in the low-frequency limit, finding excellent agreement with the numerical results. For a wide range of parameters, energy fluxes on the horizon are negative for all orbital radii: the modes are amplif...