Orbital angular momentum of scalar field generated by gravitational scatterings

Abstract

It has been expected that astronomical observations to detect the orbital angular momenta of electromagnetic waves may give us a new insight into astrophysics. Previous works pointed out the possibility that a rotating black hole can produce orbital angular momenta of electromagnetic waves through gravitational scattering, and the spin parameter of the black hole can be measured by observing them. However, the mechanism how the orbital angular momentum of the electromagnetic wave is generated by the gravitational scattering has not been clarified sufficiently. In this paper, in order to understand it from a point of view of gravitational lensing effects, we consider an emitter which radiates a spherical wave of the real massless scalar field and study the deformation of the scalar wave by the gravitational scattering due to a black hole by invoking the geometrical optics approximation. We show that the frame dragging caused by the rotating black hole is not a necessary condition for generating the orbital angular momentum of the scalar wave. However, its components parallel to the direction cosines of images appear only if the black hole is rotating.