No Arabic abstract
In an accretion of fluid, its velocity may transit from subsonic to supersonic. The point at which such transition occurs is called sonic point and often mathematically special. We consider a steady-state and spherically symmetric accretion problem of ideal photon gas in general static spherically symmetric spacetime neglecting back reaction. Our main result is that the EOS of ideal photon gas leads to correspondence between its sonic point and the photon sphere of the spacetime in general situations. Despite of the dependence of the EOS on the dimension of spacetime, this correspondence holds for spacetimes of arbitrary dimensions.
We study closed photon orbits in spherically-symmetric static solutions of supergravity theories, a Horndeski theory, and a theory of quintessence. These orbits lie in what we shall call a photon sphere (anti-photon sphere) if the orbit is unstable (stable). We show that in all the asymptotically flat solutions we examine that admit a regular event horizon, and whose energy-momentum tensor satisfies the strong energy condition, there is one and only one photon sphere outside the event horizon. We give an example of a Horndeski theory black hole (whose energy-momentum tensor violates the strong energy condition) whose metric admits both a photon sphere and an anti-photon sphere. The uniqueness and non-existence also holds for asymptotically anti-de Sitter solutions in gauged supergravity. The latter also exhibit the projective symmetry that was first discovered for the Schwarzschild-de Sitter metrics: the unparameterised null geodesics are the same as when the cosmological or gauge coupling constant vanishes. We also study the closely related problem of accretion flows by perfect fluids in these metrics. For a radiation fluid, Bondis sonic horizon coincides with the photon sphere. For a general polytropic equation of state this is not the case. Finally we exhibit counterexamples to a conjecture of Hods.
The sonic point/photon surface correspondence is thoroughly investigated in a general setting. First, we investigate a sonic point of a transonic steady perfect fluid flow in a general stationary spacetime, particularly focusing on the radiation fluid. The necessary conditions that the flow must satisfy at a sonic point are derived as conditions for the kinematical quantities of the congruence of streamlines in analogy with the de Laval nozzle equation in fluid mechanics. We compare the conditions for a sonic point with the notion of a photon surface, which can be defined as a timelike totally umbilical hypersurface. As a result, we find that, for the realization of the sonic point/photon surface correspondence, the speed of sound $v_{rm s}$ must be given by $1/sqrt{d}$ with $d$ being the spatial dimension of the spacetime. For the radiation fluid ($v_{rm s}=1/sqrt{d}$), we confirm that a part of the conditions is shared by the sonic point and the photon surface. However, in general, a Bondi surface, a set of sonic points, does not necessarily coincide with a photon surface. Additional assumptions, such as a spatial symmetry, are essential to the realization of the sonic point/photon surface correspondence in all known examples.
In this paper, we first consider null geodesics of a class of charged, spherical and asymptotically flat hairy black holes in an Einstein-Maxwell-scalar theory with a non-minimal coupling for the scalar and electromagnetic fields. Remarkably, we show that there are two unstable circular orbits for a photon in a certain parameter regime, corresponding to two unstable photon spheres of different sizes outside the event horizon. To illustrate the optical appearance of photon spheres, we then consider a simple spherical model of optically thin accretion on the hairy black hole, and obtain the accretion image seen by a distant observer. In the single photon sphere case, only one bright ring appears in the image, and is identified as the edge of the black hole shadow. Whereas in the case with two photon spheres, there can be two concentric bright rings of different radii in the image, and the smaller one serves as the boundary of the shadow, whose radius goes to zero at the critical charge.
We show that photon spheres of supermassive black holes generate high-frequency stochastic gravitational waves through the photon-graviton conversion. Remarkably, the frequency is universally determined as $m_esqrt{m_e /m_p} simeq 10^{20} text{Hz}$ in terms of the proton mass $m_p$ and the electron mass $m_e$. It turns out that the density parameter of the stochastic gravitational waves $ Omega_{ text{gw}}$ could be $ 10^{-12}$. Since the existence of the gravitational waves from photon spheres is robust, it is worth seeking methods of detecting high-frequency gravitational waves around $10^{20}$Hz.
Einstein equivalence principle (EEP), as one of the foundations of general relativity, is a fundamental test of gravity theories. In this paper, we propose a new method to test the EEP of electromagnetic interactions through observations of black hole photon rings, which naturally extends the scale of Newtonian and post-Newtoian gravity where the EEP violation through a variable fine structure constant has been well constrained to that of stronger gravity. We start from a general form of Lagrangian that violates EEP, where a specific EEP violation model could be regarded as one of the cases of this Lagrangian. Within the geometrical optical approximation, we find that the dispersion relation of photons is modified: for photons moving in circular orbit, the dispersion relation simplifies, and behaves such that photons with different linear polarizations perceive different gravitational potentials. This makes the size of black hole photon ring depend on polarization. Further assuming that the EEP violation is small, we derive an approximate analytic expression for spherical black holes showing that the change in size of the photon ring is proportional to the violation parameters. We also discuss several cases of this analytic expression for specific models. Finally, we explore the effects of black hole rotation and derive a modified proportionality relation between the change in size of photon ring and the violation parameters. The numerical and analytic results show that the influence of black hole rotation on the constraints of EEP violation is relatively weak for small magnitude of EEP violation and small rotation speed of black holes.