Physics Letters B 786 (2018) 442–447
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Physics Letters B
www.elsevier.com/locate/physletb
Synchronized stationary clouds in a static fluid
Carolina L. Benone
a
, Luís C.B. Crispino
a
, Carlos A.R. Herdeiro
b,c
, Maurício Richartz
d,∗
a
Faculdade de Física, Universidade Federal do Pará, 66075-110, Belém, Pará, Brazil
b
Departamento de Física da Universidade de Aveiro and Center for Research and Development in Mathematics and Applications (CIDMA), Campus de Santiago,
3810-183 Aveiro, Portugal
c
Centro de Astrofísica e Gravitação -CENTRA, Departamento de Física, Instituto Superior Técnico - IST, Universidade de Lisboa -UL, Avenida Rovisco Pais 1,
1049-001, Portugal
d
Centro de Matemática, Computação e Cognição, Universidade Federal do ABC (UFABC), 09210-170 Santo André, São Paulo, Brazil
a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t
Article history:
Received
14 September 2018
Received
in revised form 8 October 2018
Accepted
15 October 2018
Available
online 19 October 2018
Editor:
M. Cveti
ˇ
c
Keywords:
Stationary
clouds
Analogue
models of gravity
Black
holes
The existence of stationary bound states for the hydrodynamic velocity field between two concentric
cylinders is established. We argue that rotational motion, together with a trapping mechanism for the
associated field, is sufficient to mitigate energy dissipation between the cylinders, thus allowing the
existence of infinitely long lived modes, which we dub stationary clouds. We demonstrate the existence of
such stationary clouds for sound and surface waves when the fluid is static and the internal cylinder
rotates with constant angular velocity . These setups provide a unique opportunity for the first
experimental observation of synchronized stationary clouds. As in the case of bosonic fields around
rotating black holes and black hole analogues, the existence of these clouds relies on a synchronization
condition between and the angular phase velocity of the cloud.
© 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Funded by SCOAP
3
.
1. Introduction
With a few notable exceptions, like in superconductivity, dis-
sipation
plays an important and decisive role in Physics. Due to
dissipation, the oscillations of any perturbed system (for instance
a ringing bell) will die away with the passing of time. In gen-
eral,
waves propagating in realistic (hence dissipative) media will
lose energy and hence decrease their amplitude in time. Black hole
(BH) absorption in a scattering process and BH response to pertur-
bations
(quasinormal modes), for example, can be interpreted as
manifestations of dissipation: the event horizon acts as a one-way
membrane which extracts energy from the BH exterior, dissipating
any external perturbation [1–4].
Linear
perturbations of a dissipative system will generically de-
cay
in time according to exp(−iωt), where ω is a complex fre-
quency.
Combined with rotational motion, however, dissipation can
be mitigated and unexpected phenomena arise. One such exam-
ple
is superradiance, a scattering process in which low-frequency
modes are amplified by a rotating object [5–8]. This amplification
*
Corresponding author.
E-mail
addresses: lben.carol@gmail.com (C.L. Benone), crispino@ufpa.br
(L.C.B. Crispino),
herdeiro@ua.pt (C.A.R. Herdeiro), mauricio.richartz@ufabc.edu.br
(M. Richartz).
effect can be understood as the dissipation of negative energies
(with respect to the rest frame of the rotating object), meaning
that low-frequency waves can lower the energy of the rotating
system. In other words, while in the laboratory frame the flux of
dissipated energy is proportional to the oscillation frequency ω of
the waves, in the rotating frame the energy flux is proportional
to the effective frequency
˜
ω = ω −m, where m is the azimuthal
number of the wave and is the angular velocity of the scatterer.
Therefore, sufficiently low-frequency waves satisfying
˜
ω < 0will
reverse the energy flux direction, thus extracting energy from the
rotating object.
If,
besides rotational motion, an additional trapping mechanism
is present in the system, a feedback process, in which successive
superradiant amplifications occur, is triggered. As a result, the sys-
tem
will exhibit superradiant instabilities which, at the linear level,
grow exponentially in time. Such unstable modes have Im(ω) > 0.
At the threshold between stable and unstable modes, stationary
bound
states, characterized by Im(ω) = 0, exist. Such bound states,
dubbed stationary clouds, are generic features of rotating, dissipa-
tive
systems. Nevertheless, they have never been experimentally
observed.
Stationary
clouds have played a key role, for instance, in re-
cent
developments in BHs physics. They appear when a scalar
wave is synchronized with a rotating BH, meaning that the wave’s
angular phase velocity, ω/m, matches the angular velocity of
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physletb.2018.10.030
0370-2693/
© 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Funded by
SCOAP
3
.