First-Principles Plasma Simulations of Black-Hole Jet Launching

Understand

Black holes drive powerful plasma jets to relativistic velocities.

• This plasma should be collisionless, and self-consistently supplied by pair creation near the horizon.
• We present general-relativistic collisionless plasma simulations of Kerr-black-hole magnetospheres which begin from vacuum, inject electron-positron pairs based on local unscreened electric fields, and reach steady states with electromagnetically powered Blandford-Znajek jets and persistent current sheets.
• Particles with negative energy-at-infinity are a general feature, and can contribute significantly to black-hole rotational-energy extraction in a variant of the Penrose process.