Extending the Comisso-Asenjo Energy Extraction Mechanism to Pure Lovelock Gravity

Abstract

In this paper, we extend the Comisso-Asenjo magnetic reconnection (MR) mechanism to rotating black holes (BHs) in pure Lovelock/Gauss-Bonnet (GB) gravity in dimension $2N+2\leq D\leq 4N+1$ (where $N$ is the Lovelock polynomial degree of $N$th order term in the action). We perform a comprehensive analysis of the efficiency and power of extracted energy by exploring the effects of the spin parameter, plasma magnetization, magnetic field orientation, and reconnection location. Our results reveal distinctive energetic features of pure Lovelock BHs relative to their Einstein counterparts, except in the special case of $D=3N+1$, where the two theories coincide. Our results demonstrate that magnetic reconnection becomes increasingly efficient in extracting rotational energy from rapidly rotating pure Lovelock BHs with single rotation configuration as the spacetime dimension increases from $D=6$ to $9$. Furthermore, the Comisso-Asenjo MR mechanism can produce higher extraction power than the Blandford-Znajek (BZ) process in certain regions of parameter space because of its enhanced energy extraction rate. These results show that magnetic reconnection is an efficient mechanism for extracting rotational energy from rapidly rotating pure Lovelock/GB BHs, highlighting their relevance to high-energy astrophysical phenomena.