Charged Spinning Black Holes as Particle Accelerators

Abstract

It has recently been pointed out that the spinning Kerr black hole with maximal spin could act as a particle collider with arbitrarily high center-of-mass energy. In this paper, we will extend the result to the charged spinning black hole, the Kerr-Newman black hole. The center-of-mass energy of collision for two uncharged particles falling freely from rest at infinity depends not only on the spin $a$ but also on the charge $Q$ of the black hole. We find that an unlimited center-of-mass energy can be approached with the conditions: (1) the collision takes place at the horizon of an extremal black hole; (2) one of the colliding particles has critical angular momentum; (3) the spin $a$ of the extremal black hole satisfies $\frac{1}{\sqrt{3}}\leq \frac{a}{M}\leq 1$, where $M$ is the mass of the Kerr-Newman black hole. The third condition implies that to obtain an arbitrarily high energy, the extremal Kerr-Newman black hole must have a large value of spin, which is a significant difference between the Kerr and Kerr-Newman black holes. Furthermore, we also show that, for a near-extremal black hole, there always exists a finite upper bound for center-of-mass energy, which decreases with the increase of the charge $Q$.