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I was reading this writing (https://davidwoolsey.com/AttO/AttO_blog/Entries/2020/7/13_Black_Holes_and_Transverse_Tidal_Effects%2C_a_revised_essay_on_some_thoughts.html) about considering tidal effects in black hole models.

Outside of the main topic of the writing, there is a part that got my attention:

The author indicates that in the context of Hawking radiation, only particles (like photons) with small enough orbital angular momentum will escape to infinity.

This made me think: could there be black holes with extremely large angular momentum that could transfer themselves part of it to escaping photons (even if they initially had small amounts of angular momentum upon escaping)? For example, I was thinking, if a black hole with an enormous spin emitted Hawking radiation and while escaping it made contact with the photon ring or the ergosphere (regions with high angular momentum), perhaps the photons could acquire quite a bit amount of angular momentum from these zones (which would be given by the black hole itself) trapping the photons forever, or even making them return to the black hole. Could this be possible? Is it possible that black holes trap their own Hawking radiation?

I have also been told that a loop diagram that would be part of the vavuum state of QFT would make this possible. Can this happen in a black hole?

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Is it possible that black holes trap their own Hawking radiation?

Certainly, this is precisely what happens. In a sense, only a tiny fraction of photons created near the black hole horizon escapes to infinity, the rest falls back into the black hole.

The relevant concept is black hole's greybody factors which is the ratio of flux at infinity to the flux at the horizon (for a given species, frequency, orbital angular momentum number etc. of Hawking radiation). For many modes of radiation those quantities are exponentially small, meaning that there is only a small chance that a photon with corresponding quantum numbers escapes to infinity. In fact, black holes are such long lived objects because they capture most of photons that (at least temporarily) escape the horizon.

While it is often emphasized that a photon in curved spacetime is an observer dependent concept, those photons near the black hole that do not escape to infinity should be treated as perfectly real objects. In particular, the energy of those photons contributes to $\langle T_{ab}\rangle$, averaged stress-energy tensor of quantum fields, and if we are willing to lower a detector toward near-horizon region those photons could be absorbed and their energy extracted.

Image from Brown's Sci. Am. Article

Imagine the following situation: a short distance away from the black hole a perfectly absorbing screen is placed capturing all the radiation from the horizon that got to this distance and then the absorbed energy is removed by some mechanism such as thermal conduction or coolant circulation. In this case the mass loss of black hole can be considerably enhanced and its lifetime would be much shorter, see this answer for more details and further references (the image above is taken from one of the references).

… could there be black holes with extremely large angular momentum that could transfer themselves part of it to escaping photons (even if they initially had small amounts of angular momentum upon escaping)?

It doesn't work like this. The component of photon's angular momentum along the black hole axis of rotation is a conserved quantity of photon's motion, so a photon once created will not take any of the black hole's angular momentum. Instead, there is a superradiance phenomenon: a wave scattering of the black hole is amplified under certain conditions, or in quantum language, occupancy numbers of a EM wave (or other types of boson quanta) are increased upon scattering i.e. new photons are created in this radiation mode. One can think of superradiance as a stimulated emission, whereas Hawking radiation is spontaneous emission, those two effects are closely related (similarly to relations between Einstein's A and B coefficients).

By itself superradiance does not provide a mechanism to confine the radiation, yet if there is some such mechanism then superradiance can extract considerable quantities of black hole angular momentum and rotational energy in a short time. One such mechanism is known as black hole bomb, hypothetical device where a mirror is placed around a rotating black hole extracting huge amounts of rotational energy via EM radiation. Another mechanism are massive bosonic fields which can have stable(-ish) bound modes around black holes (a sort of gravitational atom). If such modes exhibit superradiance their occupancy numbers would be growing exponentially until black hole loses enough angular momentum. Of course, for this last scenario to work our Universe must have stable weakly interacting bosons with small masses (for best efficiency Compton wavelength of such boson must be comparable to black hole's Schwarzschild radius). Potentially, this could lead to observable consequences such as gravitational wave signatures and populations of BHs without high spin parameters. Alternatively, observation of BHs with large angular momentum provides constraints on possible existence of light bosons.

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  • $\begingroup$ "the energy of those photons contributes to $\langle T_{ab}\rangle$, averaged stress-energy tensor of quantum fields" - The stress-energy tensor of a particle doesn't depend on the boost of the frame (its components do, but the tensor itself as a physical object doesn't). In other words, the frame dependent kinetic energy cannot contribute to the tensor. So in the limit of $m\to 0$, the tensor is zero regardless of the speed. This means that the tensor of the null dust is zero. If this is correct, but the SE tensor of photons is not zero, then in what physical sense are they not null dust? $\endgroup$
    – safesphere
    Commented May 3 at 9:46
  • $\begingroup$ @A.V.S. I found this article (arxiv.org/abs/1501.06570) where the authors indicate that the radiation from superradiance mechanisms can be confined. Could Hawking radiation be similarly confined this way? $\endgroup$
    – vengaq
    Commented May 3 at 10:54
  • $\begingroup$ Sure. Put a mirror around BH and the photons of Hawking radiation would be reflected back. Soon equilibrium would be achieved where the photon flux from and into BH are the same. But if such a mirror is made of ordinary matter it will still be transparent for gravitons (and other stuff like neutrinoes). So if the goal was to have eternal BH this would not work though the lifetime would increase by order of magnitude ( of course if we ignore that baryon matter could be susceptible to proton decay). $\endgroup$
    – A.V.S.
    Commented May 3 at 11:36
  • $\begingroup$ @A.V.S. and through some other mechanisms that do not involve matter or man-made constructions? In the article I linked (arxiv.org/pdf/1501.06570) the authors mention massive fields, magnetic fields, anti-de Sitter boundaries or nonlinear interactions as possible mechanisms confining radiation from superradiance. Could this also be applied to trap Hawking radiation? $\endgroup$
    – vengaq
    Commented May 3 at 14:07
  • $\begingroup$ Again, sure. Take for instance nonlinear interactions. Because of them the Hawking radiation of astrophysical black holes would not have any gluon modes of radiation, even though at a glance gluons are massless and there are eight gluon color combinations. $\endgroup$
    – A.V.S.
    Commented May 3 at 14:59

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