Exotic marginally outer trapped surfaces in rotating spacetimes of any dimension

Abstract

The recently developed MOTSodesic method for locating marginally outer trapped surfaces was effectively restricted to non-rotating spacetimes. In this paper we extend the method to include (multi-)axisymmetric time slices of (multi-)axisymmetric spacetimes of any dimension. We then apply this method to study marginally outer trapped surfaces (MOTSs) in the BTZ, Kerr and Myers-Perry black holes. While there are many similarities between the MOTSs observed in these spacetimes and those seen in Schwarzschild and Reissner-Nordström, details of the more complicated geometries also introduce some new, previously unseen, behaviours.

Symmetry and instability of marginally outer trapped surfaces

“…However, MOTSs are more than just apparent horizons. They can have complicated self-intersecting geometries [10,12,26,[40][41][42][43] and non-spherical topologies [20,31,34,36,42]. Such exotic surfaces have also been shown to play a key role in black hole mergers, with a complicated series of MOTS pair creations and annihilations ultimately destroying the original pair of apparent horizons and resulting in a single final apparent horizon [42,43].…”

“…They do not address exotic MOTSs that have the same symmetries as the slice in which they are embedded nor do they cover MOTSs found in non-symmetric slices of highly symmetric spacetimes. As such they do not address such examples as the exotic MOTSs found in slices of the Kerr spacetime [10], MOTSs found in non-symmetric slicings of Vaidya [37] or the exotic MOTSs found in three-black-hole initial data [38]. At least in their current form, they also do not address MOTSs that might be found in Killing initial data (KID) [6], that is, initial data that evolves into a symmetric spacetime even though it does not share those symmetries.…”