The Department of Mathematics at the University of Malta is organising a talk by Prof. Elizabeth Winstanley (University of Sheffield, UK). The talk entitled 'Black hole bombs: hairy black holes as possible end-points of superradiant instabilities', will be held on Thursday, 25 May from 11:00 to noon in Room 405 Maths and Physics Building.
Abstract
Energy can be extracted from rotating black holes by the superradiant reflection of classical scalar field waves. If the rotating black hole is enclosed in a cavity, repeated reflection of super radiant waves leads to an instability known as the "black hole bomb". A natural question is what happens to the black hole bomb, that is, what is the ultimate black hole configuration?
For a rotating black hole, this question is very difficult to answer, so in this talk we consider a mathematically simpler system. Superradiance also occurs for charged scalar field waves incident on a charged black hole, and there is a black hole bomb instability if the black hole is inside a reflecting mirror. We present black holes with charged scalar field hair and describe recent evidence that these are possible end-points of the charge-superradiant instability.
We discuss the implications of this result for rotating black holes.