More Nonlinearities? II. A Short Guide of First- and Second-Order Electromagnetic Perturbations in the Schwarzschild Background

TL;DR

This paper investigates second-order electromagnetic perturbations in Schwarzschild spacetime, deriving source terms, exploring mode mixing, and demonstrating potential implications for multi-messenger astrophysics with gravitational wave detectors.

Contribution

It derives effective source terms for second-order electromagnetic perturbations and analyzes mode mixing, extending previous work on gravitational perturbations to electromagnetic fields.

Findings

Second-order electromagnetic perturbations are quadratic in first-order modes.

Linear gravitational modes are excited with amplitudes depending on electromagnetic potential.

Second-order QNM mixing occurs at sum frequencies of first-order modes.

Abstract

We study second-order electromagnetic perturbations in the Schwarzschild background and derive the effective source terms for Regge-Wheeler equation which are quadratic in first-order gravitational and electromagnetic perturbations. In addition to the induced mixed quadratic modes, we find that linear gravitational modes are also excited, with amplitudes dependent on the electromagnetic potential. A toy model involving a Dirac delta function potential demonstrates mixing of linear gravitational and electromagnetic perturbations with frequencies \( \omega^{(1)} \) and \( \Omega^{(1)} \), resulting in the second-order QNM mixing in the electromagnetic field at \( \Omega^{(2)} =\Omega^{(1)} + \omega^{(1)} \). This complements prior work in \cite{aly2024nonlinearities} on the second-order gravitational perturbation mixing and highlights potential applications in multi-messenger astrophysics for systems observed by LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) and upcoming LISA. We also study first-order perturbations due to a point charge and show it could be reduced to a one-dimensional path integral. Within the toy model, we investigate the first-order electromagnetic perturbation due to a radially free-falling single charge \( q \) and radial dipole moment \( p = q \eta \), employing semi-analytical and numerical methods. For the dipole case, we show that the QNM perturbation is excited with a nearly constant amplitude. Future work will focus on incorporating mixing in more realistic potentials and exploring numerical approach in the context of rotating spacetimes.