Light rings in static and extremal black holes

Abstract

In this work we establish some results concerning the existence of external light rings in extremal black hole spacetimes through the Newman-Penrose formalism. Specifically, assuming flat or (anti)--de Sitter asymptotics, staticity and the null energy condition, we show that a sufficient condition for the existence of external light rings is $R<2{K}_{G}$, where $R$, the curvature scalar of the spacetime and ${K}_{G}$, the Gaussian curvature of a spacelike two-surface, are both evaluated at the outermost event horizon, which can be endowed with spherical, hyperbolic or planar geometry. Our results are valid for any metric gravity theory where photons follow null geodesics.