Tidal Forces in Majumdar-Papapetrou Spacetimes

Abstract

Tidal disruption events occur when astrophysical objects are destroyed by black holes due to strong tidal force effects. Tidal forces have been studied in a variety of black hole spacetimes, including Reissner-Nordström and Kerr spacetimes. Despite the vast literature on the subject, tidal forces around black holes in static equilibrium have never been investigated before. The aim of this work is to fill in this gap and explore tidal forces in the Majumdar-Papapetrou spacetime describing two extremely charged binary black holes in equilibrium. We focus on tidal forces associated with radial and circular geodesics of massive neutral particles moving on the plane equidistant to the black holes. In particular, we study the behavior of the tidal forces as a function of the distance from the black holes and as a function of the energy of the geodesics. We also investigate the numerical solutions of the geodesic deviation equation for different initial conditions.