Probing Kalb-Ramond gravity with charged rotating black holes: constraints from EHT observations

TL;DR

This paper tests Kalb-Ramond gravity, a string-inspired modified gravity theory, against EHT black hole observations by analyzing shadow sizes of M87* and Sgr A* to constrain Lorentz-violating parameters.

Contribution

It provides the first observational constraints on Lorentz-violating parameters in Kalb-Ramond gravity using EHT black hole shadow data.

Findings

EHT observations constrain the Lorentz-violating parameter to approximately -0.019 to 0.075 for M87*.

Shadow size constraints imply an upper bound of about 0.19 on the Lorentz-violating parameter from Sgr A*.

Charge affects black hole shadow distortions, while the Lorentz-violating parameter suppresses shadow radius.

Abstract

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) has guided strong-field gravitational physics by providing the first direct images of the supermassive black holes M87* and Sagittarius A*. The EHT observations offer unprecedented opportunities to test modified gravity theories against general relativity (GR). Motivated by this, we investigate charged rotating black holes in KR gravity, a framework motivated by string theory that incorporates spontaneous Lorentz symmetry breaking. The spacetime geometry is characterized by a Lorentz--violating parameter $\ell$ and electric charge $Q$, which modify the Kerr--Newman metric through a radial-dependent mass function. We compute black hole shadows and derive constraints on $\ell$ and $Q$ using EHT observations of M87* and Sgr A*. For angular shadow diameter $\theta_{\rm sh}$ of M87* at inclination $\theta_o=17^\circ$ and fixed $Q=0.2$, the EHT-allowed range $\theta_{\rm sh}\in(35.1,\,40.5)\,\mu\mathrm{as}$ constrains the Lorentz--violating parameter to approximately $-0.019\lesssim\ell\lesssim0.075$ and $-0.076\lesssim\ell\lesssim0.029$ across the admissible spin interval. For angular shadow diameter $\theta_{\rm sh}$ of Sgr A* at inclination $\theta_o=50^\circ$ and fixed $Q=0.2$, the corresponding EHT-allowed range $\theta_{\rm sh}\in(41.7,\,55.7)\,\mu\mathrm{as}$ permits approximately $-0.075\lesssim\ell\lesssim0.110$ and $-0.124\lesssim\ell\lesssim0.076$ across the admissible spin interval. Our analysis reveals that the Lorentz-violating parameter suppresses the shadow radius by a factor $\sqrt{1-\ell}$, while charge introduces additional distortions. Using the angular shadow diameter measured by EHT, we obtain an upper bound $\ell \lesssim 0.19$ from Sgr A* data with the stellar dynamics mass prior.