Causal production of the electromagnetic energy flux and role of the negative energies in Blandford-Znajek process

Understand

Blandford-Znajek process, the steady electromagnetic energy extraction from a rotating black hole (BH), is widely believed to work for driving relativistic jets in active galactic nuclei, gamma-ray bursts and Galactic microquasars, although it is still under debate how the Poynting flux is causally produced and how the rotational energy of the BH is reduced.

• We generically discuss the Kerr BH magnetosphere filled with a collisionless plasma screening the electric field along the magnetic field, extending the arguments of Komissarov and our previous paper, and propose a new picture for resolving the issues.
• For the magnetic field lines threading the equatorial plane in the ergosphere, we find that the inflow of particles with negative energy as measured in the coordinate basis is generated near that plane as a feedback from the Poynting flux production, which appears to be a similar process to the mechanical Penrose process.
• For the field lines threading the event horizon, we first show that the concept of the steady inflow of negative electromagnetic energy is not physically essential, partly because the sign of the electromagnetic energy density depends on the coordinates.