On a zero-gravity limit of the Kerr--Newman spacetimes and their electromagnetic fields

Abstract

We discuss the limit of vanishing $G$ (Newton's constant of universal gravitation) of the maximal analytically extended Kerr--Newman electrovacuum spacetimes {represented in Boyer--Lindquist coordinates}. We investigate the topologically nontrivial spacetime emerging in this limit and show that it consists of two copies of flat Minkowski spacetime glued at a timelike solid cylinder. As $G\to 0$, the electromagnetic fields of the Kerr-Newman spacetimes converge to nontrivial solutions of Maxwell's equations on this background spacetime. We show how to obtain these fields by solving Maxwell's equations with singular sources supported only on a circle in a spacelike slice of the spacetime. These sources do not suffer from any of the pathologies that plague the alternate sources found in previous attempts to interpret the Kerr--Newman fields on the topologically simple Minkowski spacetime. We characterize the singular behavior of these sources and prove that the Kerr-Newman electrostatic potential and magnetic stream function are the unique solutions of the Maxwell equations among all functions that have the same blow-up behavior at the ring singularity.