Charge-Activated Birefringence and Shadow Mimicry around Reissner-Nordström Black Holes

Abstract

We discover that electric charge can activates birefringence for a neutral vector field coupled to the Einstein tensor around a Reissner-Nordström black hole. Changing the electric charge of an uncoupled black hole can mimic one parity's shadow radius of a coupled black hole. The coupling makes the two parity looks differently. It separates their shadow edges of two parities and produces a backward-scattered signal with reversed helicity. However changing the charge alone cannot reproduce both effects. They require both nonzero charge and coupling. At weak coupling, the leading correction is the same for both potential. Positive coupling raises the potential, reduces low-frequency absorption and decrease the average shadow radius. Negative coupling reverses these trends. The backward signal is nonzero, this is due to the difference between the complex scattering amplitudes of the two parities. It is entirely helicity reversed. For the uncoupled field, the shadows is the same for both parities and the backward intensity vanishes exactly at every charge. We can use the split edge and backward signal to distinguish the coupling from a change of charge alone. A comparison with observations still requires a mechanism that produces and detects this field.