Exotic marginally outer trapped surfaces in rotating spacetimes of any dimension

TL;DR

This paper extends the MOTSodesic method to higher-dimensional, rotating spacetimes and applies it to various black hole solutions, revealing new behaviors of marginally outer trapped surfaces.

Contribution

It generalizes the MOTSodesic method to axisymmetric spacetimes of any dimension, enabling analysis of MOTSs in rotating black holes like Kerr and Myers-Perry.

Findings

Identified new behaviors of MOTSs in rotating black holes.

Extended the applicability of the MOTSodesic method to higher dimensions.

Compared MOTSs in rotating spacetimes with those in non-rotating cases.

Abstract

The recently developed MOTSodesic method for locating marginally outer trapped surfaces was effectively restricted to non-rotating spacetimes. In this paper we extend the method to (multi-)axisymmetric time slices of (multi-)axisymmetric spacetimes of any dimension. We then apply this method to study marginally outer trapped surfaces (MOTSs) in the BTZ, Kerr and Myers-Perry black holes. While there are many similarities between the MOTSs observed in these spacetimes and those seen in Schwarzschild and Reissner-Nordstr\"om, details of the more complicated geometries also introduce some new, previously unseen, behaviours.