Stealth Chaos due to Frame Dragging

Understand

While the geodesic motion around a Kerr black hole is fully integrable and therefore regular, numerical explorations of the phase-space around other spacetime configurations, with a different multipolar structure, have displayed chaotic features.

• In most of these solutions, the role of the purely general relativistic effect of frame-dragging in chaos has eluded a definite answer.
• In this work, we show that, when considering neutral test particles around a family of stationary axially-symmetric analytical exact solution to the Einstein-Maxwell field equations, frame-dragging (as captured through spacetime vorticity) is capable of reconstructing KAM-tori from initially highly chaotic configurations.
• We study this reconstruction by isolating the contribution of the spacetime vorticity scalar to the dynamics, and exemplify our findings by computing rotation curves and the dimensionality of phase-space.