Motion of charged particle in Reissner-Nordstrom spacetime: A Jacobi metric approach

Abstract

The present work discusses motion of neutral and charged particles in Reissner - Nordstrom spacetime. The constant energy paths are derived in a variational principle framework using the Jacobi metric which is parameterized by conserved particle energy. Of particular interest is the case of particle charge and Reissner-Nordstrom black hole charge being of same sign since this leads to a clash of opposing forces - gravitational (attractive) and Coulomb (repulsive). Our paper aims to compliment the recent works of Pugliese, Quevedo and Ruffini [1,2]. The energy dependent Gaussian curvature (induced by Jacobi metric), plays an important role in classifying the trajectories.