Curvature Invariants for Charged and Rotating Black Holes

Abstract

Riemann curvature invariants are important in general relativity because they encode the geometrical properties of spacetime in a manifestly coordinate-invariant way. Fourteen such invariants are required to characterize four-dimensional spacetime in general, and Zakhary and McIntosh showed that as many as seventeen can be required in certain degenerate cases. We calculate explicit expressions for all seventeen of these Zakhary–McIntosh curvature invariants for the Kerr–Newman metric that describes spacetime around black holes of the most general kind (those with mass, charge, and spin), and confirm that they are related by eight algebraic conditions (dubbed syzygies by Zakhary and McIntosh), which serve as a useful check on our results. Plots of these invariants show richer structure than is suggested by traditional (coordinate-dependent) textbook depictions, and may repay further investigation.