I Black Hole Bomb Effectiveness: Mirrors or Wormholes?

[Vanilla Gorilla]

TL;DR Summary

I have a question. For the Black Hole Bomb to be effective, does it need the mirrors there, or can they be replaced with wormholes or some other quirk of spacetime? Have a lovely day!

For the Black Hole Bomb to be effective, does it need the mirrors there, or can they be replaced with wormholes, or some other quirk of spacetime?

 

[PeterDonis]

the Black Hole Bomb

What is the black hole bomb? Can you give a reference?

 

[Vanilla Gorilla]

That video explains it simply :)

 

[Ibix]

Wikipedia reference if you don't want to sit through the video. It appears to be referring to black hole superradiance, an EM variant on the Penrose process, if I understand correctly.

 

[PeterDonis]

Wikipedia reference if you don't want to sit through the video. It appears to be referring to black hole superradiance, an EM variant on the Penrose process, if I understand correctly.

Thanks for the reference, much better than the video since the article provides links to actual papers. I'll have to take some time to read them before I can say much on the topic.

For the Black Hole Bomb to be effective, does it need the mirrors there, or can they be replaced with wormholes, or some other quirk of spacetime?

As above, I'll need to read the papers referenced in the Wikipedia article, but my initial thought is that wormholes or similar things would defocus the superradiant beams (similar to the way they defocus EM radiation and vacuum fluctuations passing through them--Kip Thorne discusses this in Black Holes and Time Warps, and in at least one of his peer-reviewed wormhole papers) and therefore would probably not work in place of mirrors as the amount of superradiant energy that would end up being trapped would not be enough to cause the instability.

 

[Vanilla Gorilla]

But if any was trapped at all, because the process is looping, could this not have the same effect?

 

[PeterDonis]

if any was trapped at all, because the process is looping, could this not have the same effect?

I don't know what you mean by "the process is looping". The "process" in question is having radiation emitted by the black hole (that's what superradiance is) reflected back towards the hole. If not enough is reflected, the instability won't occur. I don't think enough would be reflected (or the equivalent) with a wormhole. But, as I said, I have not yet read through the papers referenced in the Wikipedia article in detail.

 

[Vanilla Gorilla]

Oh I see what you meant; what I meant is that the wormholes surrounding the black hole would be able to keep the process going, theoretically having it go until the black holes and or wormholes evaporate (Whichever goes first, assuming wormholes would even evaporate, assuming that they're even real);

 

[PeterDonis]

what I meant is that the wormholes surrounding the black hole would be able to keep the process going

And I'm saying I'm not sure that's possible, because wormholes defocus radiation passing through them, so it's not clear to me that they would direct enough radiation back at the hole to cause the instability.

 

[Vanilla Gorilla]

Ok, thank you for the help :)