Scalar fields and particle accelerators

Abstract

The phenomenon discovered in 2009 by Ba\~nados, Silk and West where particle collisions can achieve arbitrary high center-of-mass (c.m.) energies close to the event horizon of an extreme Kerr black hole, has generated a lot of interest. Although rotation seemed to be an essential requirement, it was later shown that arbitrary high energies can also be achieved for collisions between radially moving particles near the horizon of the electrically charged extreme Reissner-Nordstr\om black hole. Recently Patil and Joshi claimed that instead of spinning up the black hole one can also crank up the c.m. energy of particle collisions by ``charging up'' a static black hole with a massless scalar field. In this regard they showed that infinite energies can be attained in the vicinity of the naked singularity of the Janis-Newman-Wincour (JNW) spacetime, which contains a massless scalar field that also becomes infinite at the position of the curvature singularity. In this study we show that Patil and Joshi's claim does not apply for other static black hole systems endowed with a massless scalar field. In particular we consider the well-known Bekenstein black hole and the recently discovered Mart\'{\i}nez-Troncoso-Zanelli black hole, and show that the expression of the c.m. energy for particle collisions near the event horizons of these black holes is no different than the corresponding case with vanishing scalar field represented by the Schwarzschild solution. Moreover by studying the motion of scalar test charges that interact with the background scalar field in these black hole spacetimes we show that the resulting c.m. energies are even smaller than in the case of free particles. This shows that the infinite energies obtained by Patil and Joshi may not be due to the fact that the black hole contains a massless scalar field, but may be instead related to the geometry of the naked singularity in the JNW spacetime. An analogous case of infinite c.m. energy in the vicinity of a naked singularity is also presented.