Kerr Naked Singularities as Particle Accelerators

Abstract

We investigate here the particle acceleration by Kerr naked singularities. We consider a collision between particles dropped in from infinity at rest, which follow geodesic motion in the equatorial plane, with their angular momenta in an appropriate finite range of values. When an event horizon is absent, an initially infalling particle turns back as an outgoing particle, when it has the angular momentum in an appropriate range of values, which then collides with infalling particles. When the collision takes place close to what would have been the event horizon in the extremal case, the center of mass energy of collision is arbitrarily large, depending on how close is the overspinning Kerr geometry to the extremal case. Thus the fast rotating Kerr configurations if they exist in nature could provide an excellent cosmic laboratory to probe ultra-high-energy physics.