Informal Pizza Seminar

A rigorous treatment of energy extraction from the Kerr black hole

Niky Kamran

Department of Mathematics and Statistics
McGill University

The Cauchy problem is considered for the scalar wave equation in the Kerr geometry. Using an integral spectral representation of the propagator, we prove that by choosing a suitable wave packet as initial data, one can extract energy and angular momentum from the black hole, thereby putting supperradiance, the wave analogue of the Penrose process, into a rigorous mathematical framework. This is joint work with Felix Finster, Joel Smoller and Shing-Tung Yau, gr-qc/0701018.