Thursday, July 11, 2013
Two papers in Physical Review Letters
Two papers by our group have been accepted in Physical Review Letters in the past few weeks.
The first paper, Gravito-Electromagnetic Perturbations of Kerr-Newman Black Holes: Stability and Isospectrality in the Slow-Rotation Limit , presents the first calculation of the coupled gravitational/electromagnetic oscillation modes of charged, rotating black holes. This is a difficult technical problem that we solved by working in the limit where the black hole spins slowly. Quite interestingly, we found that oscillations of opposite parity have the same oscillation frequencies up to linear order in the black hole rotation.
The second paper, Universality, maximum radiation and absorption in high-energy collisions of black holes with spin, is an interesting tale of “black hole cannibalism”: using numerical simulations, we showed that when two black holes collide at speeds close to the speed of light they “eat” (absorb) about half of the gravitational radiation produced in the process. This sets an upper limit to the maximum energy that can be radiated in high-speed black hole encounters. A story about this paper can be found in the Ole Miss News website.