Effect of interconvertibility of electromagnetic and gravitational waves in strong external electromagnetic fields and the propagation of waves in the field of a charged “black hole”: PMM vol. 38, n≗ 6, 1974, pp. 1122–1129

Abstract

It is shown that the behavior of an arbitrary wave propagating in the field of a nonrotating charged black hole is defined (with the use of quadratures) by four functions. Each of these functions obeys its second order equation of the wave kind. Short electromagnetic waves falling onto a black hole are reflected by its field in the form of gravitational and electromagnetic waves whose amplitude was explicitly determined. In the case of the wave carrying rays winding around the limit cycle the reflection and transmission coefficients were obtained in the form of analytic expressions. Various physical processes taking place inside, as well as outside a collapsing star, may induce perturbations of the gravitational, electromagnetic and other fields, and lead to the appearance in the surrounding space of waves of various kinds which propagate over a distorted background and are dissipated along its inhomogeneities. In the absence of rotation and charge in a star, the analysis of small perturbations of the gravitational fields is based on the system of Einstein equations linearized around the Schwarzschild solution. In [1, 2] this system of equations, after expansion of perturbations in spherical harmonics and Fourier transformation with respect to time, was reduced to two independent linear ordinary differential equations of second order of the form of the stationary Schrödinger equation for a particle in a potential force field. Each of these equations defines one of two possible independent perturbation kinds: “even” and “odd” (the different behavior of spherical tensor harmonics at coordinate inversion is the deciding factor in the determination of the kind of perturbation [1, 2]). Although these equations were derived with the superposition on the perturbations of the metric of specific coordinate conditions, they define, as shown in [4], the behavior of invariants of the perturbed gravitational field, which imparts to the potential barriers appearing in these equations an invariant meaning. The system of Maxwell equations on the background of Schwarzschild solution also reduces to similar equations, which differ from the above only by the form of potential barriers appearing in these [5]. In the presence in the unperturbed solution of a strong electromagnetic field the gravitational and electromagnetic waves interact with each other, and transmutation takes place. The train of short periodic electromagnetic waves generates the accompanying train of gravitational waves. This phenomenon was first analyzed in [6] on and arbitrary background. It was shown in [7, 8] that dense stars surrounded by hot plasma may acquire a charge owing to splitting of charges by radiation pressure and the “sweeping out” of positrons nascent in vapors in strong electrostatic fields. The interaction of waves becomes particularly clearly evident in the neighborhood of black holes which may serve as “valves” by maintaining equilibrium between the relict electromagnetic and gravitational radiation in the Universe. Rotation of black holes intensifies this effect [6]. If a nonrotating star possesses an electrostatic charge, the definition of perturbations of the electromagnetic and gravitational fields must be based on the complete system of Einstein-Maxwell equations linearized around the Nordström-Reissner solution. (Small perturbations of electromagnetic field outside a charged black hole were considered in [9, 10] on the basis of the system of Maxwell equations on a “rigid” background of the Nordström-Reissner solution, without taking into account the interconvertibility of gravitational and electromagnetic waves, which materially affects their behavior in the neighborhood of a charged black hole). Here this system of equations which define the interacting gravitational and electromagnetic perturbations are reduced to four independent second order differential equations, two for each kind of perturbations (an importsnt part is played here by the coordinate conditions imposed on the perturbations of the metric, proposed by the authors in [4]). Perturbation components of the metric and of the electromagnetic field are determined in quadratures by the solutions of these equations. If the charge of a star tends to vanish, two of the derived equations convert to equations for gravitational waves on the background of the Schwarzschild solution [1, 2], while the twoothers become equations which are equivalent to Maxwell solutions on the same background. The short-wave asymptotics of derived equations is determined throughout including the neighborhood of the limit cycle for the wave carrying rays. These solutions far away from the point of turn coincide with those obtained in [6] for any arbitrary background. Approximation of geometric optics does not provide correct asymptotics for impact parameters of rays which are close to critical for which the Isotropie and geodesic parameters wind around the limit cycle. This case is investigated below. A similar situation in the Schwarzschild field was analyzed in [11], where analytic expressions for the wave reflection and transmission coefficients were determined, and the integral radiation stream trapped by a black hole produced by another radiation component of the dual system was calculated.