Chaotic light scattering around extremal black holes

Abstract

AbstractWe show that the scattering of light in the field of $$N\ge 3$$ N ≥ 3 static extremal black holes is chaotic in the planar case. The relativistic dynamics of such extremal objects reduce to that of a classical Hamiltonian system. Certain values of the dilaton coupling then allow one to apply techniques from symbolic dynamics and classical potential scattering. This results in a lower bound on the topological entropy of order $$\log (N-1)$$ log ( N - 1 ) , thus proving the emergence of chaotic scattering for $$N \ge 3$$ N ≥ 3 black holes.