Photon trapping in static axially symmetric spacetime

Abstract

Recently, several new characteristics have been introduced to describe null geodesic structure of strong gravitational field, such as photon regions, transversely trapping surfaces and some generalizations. They give an alternative and concise way to describe lensing and shadow features of compact objects with strong gravitational field without recurring to complete integration of the geodesic equations. Here we test this construction in the case of the Weyl metrics when geodesic equations are non-separable, and thus can not be integrated analytically, while the above characteristic surfaces and regions can be described in a closed form. We develop further our formalism for a class of static axially symmetric spacetimes introducing more detailed specification of transversely trapping surfaces in terms of their principal curvatures. Surprisingly, we find in the static case without spherical symmetry certain features, such as photon regions, previously known in the Kerr space. These photon regions can be regarded as photon spheres, "thickened" due to oblateness of the metric.