- #211
PeterDonis
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DaleSpam said:Obviously, by the nature of parallel transport, the invariant mass (norm of the four-momentum) does not redshift, but that is about the only thing that I can say for sure.
If you assigned a charge-current 4-vector to the charged object falling into the hole, its norm would also be unchanged by parallel transport, correct? In the object's instantaneous rest frame, the components would always be (q, 0, 0, 0).
DaleSpam said:For everything else I would have to work out the parallel transport equation, but in my mind it is not clear what paths to use for the various cases that have been discussed.
There are three key timelike worldlines that I see as interesting:
(1) The worldline of a neutral object free-falling into the hole. Other than adding the Q term to the "redshift factor", these should work the same as they do in Schwarzschild spacetime.
(2) The worldline of an object with like charge to the hole, with no other forces acting except the EM force.
(3) The worldline of an object with opposite charge to the hole, with no other forces acting except the EM force.
For simplicity, I would use objects "at rest at infinity" as the initial condition for all three worldlines.
The first worldline would be an infalling geodesic. The second and third would have proper acceleration determined by the Lorentz force law.
In addition, the worldlines of infalling photons might be interesting, but they would just be ingoing null geodesics, and other than including the Q term in the "redshift factor" I don't see any significant differences from Schwarzschild spacetime for these.
One other approach that might be worth looking at: use an effective potential that includes a term for the potential energy in the EM field, as well as the usual one for "gravitational potential energy" in a static spacetime. Since the EM force is conservative, a conserved total energy, including both types of "potential energy", can be defined. I've seen something like this, for example, in this paper:
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1103.1807v3.pdf