Photon rings in a holographic toy model

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Detournay, Stéphane, Kanuri, Sahaja, Lupsasca, Alexandru, Spindel, Philippe, Vandermiers, Quentin, Wutte, Raphaela
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Detournay, Stéphane
Kanuri, Sahaja
Lupsasca, Alexandru
Spindel, Philippe
Vandermiers, Quentin
Wutte, Raphaela
author_facet Detournay, Stéphane
Kanuri, Sahaja
Lupsasca, Alexandru
Spindel, Philippe
Vandermiers, Quentin
Wutte, Raphaela
contents Light circling around an astrophysical black hole can spend a long time skirting its unstably bound photon orbits before escaping to infinity. To a distant observer, this orbiting light would appear as a bright ring encircling the image of the black hole. Though not yet resolved by radio-interferometric observations from the ground, this ``photon ring'' will be the target of future space-based black hole observations. Motivated by this experimental prospect, studies have sought to elucidate the theoretical connections between the photon ring -- an observable, classical effect -- and the putative holographic description of black holes in quantum gravity. General relativity predicts that the detailed structure of the photon ring encodes the high-frequency (eikonal) spectrum of quasinormal modes (QNMs) emitted by a perturbed black hole as it rings down, and also that the photon ring displays an emergent conformal symmetry that acts upon this spectrum. In holography, the classical QNM frequencies are expected to map to Ruelle resonances of the dual quantum theory. In this paper, we explore these connections in a lower-dimensional toy model based on Warped AdS$_3$ black holes that shares many features with the (3+1)-dimensional Kerr background -- including a photon ring at finite radius -- while still providing analytic control of the QNM frequencies.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_07989
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Photon rings in a holographic toy model
Detournay, Stéphane
Kanuri, Sahaja
Lupsasca, Alexandru
Spindel, Philippe
Vandermiers, Quentin
Wutte, Raphaela
High Energy Physics - Theory
General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
Light circling around an astrophysical black hole can spend a long time skirting its unstably bound photon orbits before escaping to infinity. To a distant observer, this orbiting light would appear as a bright ring encircling the image of the black hole. Though not yet resolved by radio-interferometric observations from the ground, this ``photon ring'' will be the target of future space-based black hole observations. Motivated by this experimental prospect, studies have sought to elucidate the theoretical connections between the photon ring -- an observable, classical effect -- and the putative holographic description of black holes in quantum gravity. General relativity predicts that the detailed structure of the photon ring encodes the high-frequency (eikonal) spectrum of quasinormal modes (QNMs) emitted by a perturbed black hole as it rings down, and also that the photon ring displays an emergent conformal symmetry that acts upon this spectrum. In holography, the classical QNM frequencies are expected to map to Ruelle resonances of the dual quantum theory. In this paper, we explore these connections in a lower-dimensional toy model based on Warped AdS$_3$ black holes that shares many features with the (3+1)-dimensional Kerr background -- including a photon ring at finite radius -- while still providing analytic control of the QNM frequencies.
title Photon rings in a holographic toy model
topic High Energy Physics - Theory
General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.07989