Dynamical friction on black holes in scalar field environment
Abstract
Astrophysical black holes exist within non-vacuum environments, and their motion through these environments generically result in a force on these black holes through processes such as dynamical friction and Bondi accretion. We explore these forces numerically for black holes moving through a complex scalar field of mass m with constant acceleration a, while also revisiting the constant velocity case considered in the existing literature. The former is modeled by the C-metric, while we use Painlevé-Gullstrand metric with an additional divergence and vorticity free velocity field to mimic the constant velocity motion. Our simulations reveal several novel and interesting aspects of the drag force in both cases. For the constant velocity case, the force saturates at late times, with a value that depends on velocity in a manner distinct from known dependence. For the constant acceleration case, the force increases to a maximum value F⋆ and then reduces drastically, with F⋆ ≈ 0.3 m a. Moreover, the density wake in this case shows revivals separated by decreasing time intervals.
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BibTeX
@misc{praveen2026dynamical,
title = {{Dynamical friction on black holes in scalar field environment}},
author = {Adith Praveen and Dawood Kothawala},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = aug,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2608.28029},
eprint = {2608.28029},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.28029},
note = {CC BY-NC-ND 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Dynamical friction on black holes in scalar field environment
AU - Adith Praveen
AU - Dawood Kothawala
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/08/28
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2608.28029
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.28029
AB - Astrophysical black holes exist within non-vacuum environments, and their motion through these environments generically result in a force on these black holes through processes such as dynamical friction and Bondi accretion. We explore these forces numerically for black holes moving through a complex scalar field of mass m with constant acceleration a, while also revisiting the constant velocity case considered in the existing literature. The former is modeled by the C-metric, while we use Painlevé-Gullstrand metric with an additional divergence and vorticity free velocity field to mimic the constant velocity motion. Our simulations reveal several novel and interesting aspects of the drag force in both cases. For the constant velocity case, the force saturates at late times, with a value that depends on velocity in a manner distinct from known dependence. For the constant acceleration case, the force increases to a maximum value F_⋆ and then reduces drastically, with F_⋆ ≈ 0.3 m a. Moreover, the density wake in this case shows revivals separated by decreasing time intervals.
ER -