Topological Charge and Black Hole Photon Spheres

TL;DR

This paper uses topological methods to analyze photon spheres around black holes, showing at least one photon sphere exists outside the horizon in various spacetimes and distinguishing black holes from naked singularities topologically.

Contribution

It introduces a topological charge framework for photon spheres applicable to nonrotating black holes in different asymptotic spacetimes, extending previous results to more general cases.

Findings

Existence of at least one photon sphere outside the black hole horizon.

Total topological charge for photon spheres is always -1.

Naked singularities have zero topological charge, differing from black holes.

Abstract

Black hole photon spheres or light rings are closely linked to astronomical phenomena, such as the gravitational waves and the shadow in spherically symmetric or axi-symmetric spacetime. In Cunha and Herdeiro [Phys. Rev. Lett. 124, 181101 (2020)], a topological argument was applied for the four dimensional stationary, axi-symmetric, asymptotically flat black hole, and the result indicates that at least, there exists one standard light ring outside the black hole horizon for each rotation sense. Inspired by it, in this paper, we would like to consider a similar issue for a nonrotating, static, spherically symmetric black hole not only with asymptotically flat behavior, but also with AdS and dS behaviors. Following Duan's topological current $\phi$-mapping theory, the topological current and charge for the photon spheres are introduced. The topological current is nonzero only at the zero point of the vector field determining the location of the photon sphere. So each photon sphere can be assigned a topological charge. Considering the full exterior region, we find the total topological charge always equals -1. This result confirms that there exists at least one standard photon sphere outside of the black hole not only in asymptotically flat spacetime, but also in asymptotically AdS and dS spacetime. Then we apply the study to the dyonic black holes. We observe that even when more photon spheres are included, the total topological charge stays unchanged. Moreover, for a naked singularity, it has a vanishing topological charge, indicating that the black hole and naked singularity are in different topological classes. It is expected that this novel topological argument could provide an insightful idea on the study of the black hole photon spheres or light rings, and further cast new light on the black hole astronomical phenomena.