First-Principles Plasma Simulations of Black-Hole Jet Launching

TL;DR

This paper uses first-principles simulations to explore how collisionless plasma near black holes leads to jet formation, revealing the importance of pair creation and plasma kinetics in understanding black-hole energy extraction.

Contribution

It presents the first general-relativistic collisionless plasma simulations of Kerr black-hole magnetospheres starting from vacuum, incorporating pair creation and analyzing steady-state jet solutions.

Findings

Steady-state jets powered by electromagnetic processes are achievable in simulations.

Negative energy particles contribute to black-hole rotational energy extraction.

Plasma distribution is highly sensitive to pair-creation environments.

Abstract

Black holes drive powerful plasma jets to relativistic velocities. This plasma should be collisionless, and self-consistently supplied by pair creation near the horizon. We present general-relativistic collisionless plasma simulations of Kerr-black-hole magnetospheres which begin from vacuum, inject electron-positron pairs based on local unscreened electric fields, and reach steady states with electromagnetically powered Blandford-Znajek jets and persistent current sheets. Particles with negative energy-at-infinity are a general feature, and can contribute significantly to black-hole rotational-energy extraction in a variant of the Penrose process. The generated plasma distribution depends on the pair-creation environment, and we describe two distinct realizations of the force-free electrodynamic solution. This sensitivity suggests that plasma kinetics will be useful in interpreting future horizon-resolving submillimeter and infrared observations.