Planar domain walls in black hole spacetimes

Abstract

We investigate the behaviour of low-mass, planar domain walls in the so-called $\phi^4$ model of the scalar field on the Schwarzschild and Kerr backgrounds. We focus on a transit of a domain wall through a black hole and solve numerically the equations of motion for a range of parameters of the domain wall and the black hole. We observe a behavior resembling an occurrence of ringing modes. Perturbations of domain walls vanish during latter evolution, suggesting their stability against a passage through the black hole. The results obtained for Kerr and Reissner-Nordstr\"om black holes are also compared.