• DOI:10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.041101
• Corpus ID: 14572879

Superradiant Instability and Backreaction of Massive Vector Fields around Kerr Black Holes.

@article{East2017SuperradiantIA,
  title={Superradiant Instability and Backreaction of Massive Vector Fields around Kerr Black Holes.},
  author={William E. East and Frans Pretorius},
  journal={Physical review letters},
  year={2017},
  volume={119 4},
  pages={
          041101
        }
}

• W. East, F. Pretorius
• Published 16 April 2017
• Physics
• Physical review letters

We study the growth and saturation of the superradiant instability of a complex, massive vector (Proca) field as it extracts energy and angular momentum from a spinning black hole, using numerical solutions of the full Einstein-Proca equations. We concentrate on a rapidly spinning black hole (a=0.99) and the dominant m=1 azimuthal mode of the Proca field, with real and imaginary components of the field chosen to yield an axisymmetric stress-energy tensor and, hence, spacetime. We find that in excess of 9% of the black hole's mass can be transferred into the field. In all cases studied, the superradiant instability smoothly saturates when the black hole's horizon frequency decreases to match the frequency of the Proca cloud that spontaneously forms around the black hole.