Sonic point and photon surface

Abstract

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.