Absorption of zero-mass planar waves by dirty black holes

Abstract

Astrophysical black holes are often with companions, including other gravitating objects, accretion disks, electromagnetic fields, and others. Because of the nonlinear nature of general relativity, it is difficult to account for the gravitational effects of these companions, which can only be investigated analytically for very few cases. In this paper, we consider black holes with surrounding matter — often called dirty black holes — and analyze the absorption cross section of massless scalar fields. We start by laying out the generic setup for spherically symmetric scenarios and then specify for a simple model. We consider planar massless scalar waves impinging upon a Schwarzschild black hole surrounded by a thin spherical shell, and compute the absorption cross section. We present a selection of numerical results complementary to those presented in [C. F. B. Macedo, L. C. S. Leite and L. C. B. Crispino, Phys. Rev. D 93 (2016) 024027, arXiv:1511.08781 [gr-qc]] for arbitrary frequencies, considering different values of the shell position as well as its mass.