Superradiant scattering in Lorentz-violating gravity

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates superradiant scattering in Lorentz-violating black hole backgrounds, showing energy extraction and potential instabilities due to modified dispersion relations, with implications for analogue gravity systems.

Contribution

It provides the first explicit frequency domain analysis of superradiance in Lorentz-violating black holes, revealing significant reflectivity and possible instabilities.

Findings

Superradiance occurs for modes with l>0 in Lorentz-violating black holes.

Reflectivity can exceed 700% for certain modes and parameters.

Potential instabilities of these black holes are suggested, though astrophysical objects may be stable over long timescales.

Abstract

Black holes in Lorentz violating gravity enjoy a double horizon structure which resembles that of the Kerr solution in General Relativity. Moreover, when a scalar field with a modified dispersion relation is coupled to these backgrounds, an on-shell mode with negative energy becomes possible in the region in between the horizons. Both properties together call for the possibility of extracting energy from the black hole by scattering of waves, even if the space-time is stationary. Here, we perform such scattering explicitly in the frequency domain, showing that indeed, a superradiant effect, leading to energy extraction, can be observed for modes with $l>0$ in spherical symmetry. In particular, we show that the mode $l=1$ can display a reflectivity exceeding 700% for certain values of the Lorentz violating scale. This leads us to conjecture the instability of these space-times against such perturbations, although astrophysical size objects should have long life-times. Our results are not unique to Lorentz violating gravity and can be extended to any setting where modified dispersion relations are present, such as analogue gravity.