Chandrasekhar–Page equations describe the wave function of the
spin-½
In quantum mechanics, spin is an intrinsic property of all elementary particles. All known fermions, the particles that constitute ordinary matter, have a spin of . The spin number describes how many symmetrical facets a particle has in one ful ...
massive particles, that resulted by seeking a separable solution to the
Dirac equation
In particle physics, the Dirac equation is a relativistic wave equation derived by British physicist Paul Dirac in 1928. In its free form, or including electromagnetic interactions, it describes all spin- massive particles, called "Dirac pa ...
in
Kerr metric
The Kerr metric or Kerr geometry describes the geometry of empty spacetime around a rotating uncharged axially symmetric black hole with a quasispherical event horizon. The Kerr metric is an exact solution of the Einstein field equations of ...
or
Kerr–Newman metric. In 1976,
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar showed that a separable solution can be obtained from the
Dirac equation
In particle physics, the Dirac equation is a relativistic wave equation derived by British physicist Paul Dirac in 1928. In its free form, or including electromagnetic interactions, it describes all spin- massive particles, called "Dirac pa ...
in
Kerr metric
The Kerr metric or Kerr geometry describes the geometry of empty spacetime around a rotating uncharged axially symmetric black hole with a quasispherical event horizon. The Kerr metric is an exact solution of the Einstein field equations of ...
. Later,
Don Page extended this work to
Kerr–Newman metric, that is applicable to charged black holes. In his paper, Page notices that N. Toop also derived his results independently, as informed to him by Chandrasekhar.
By assuming a normal mode decomposition of the form
for the time and the azimuthal component of the spherical polar coordinates
, Chandrasekhar showed that the four
bispinor components can be expressed as product of radial and angular functions. The two radial and angular functions, respectively, are denoted by
,
and
,
. The energy as measured at infinity is
and the axial angular momentum is
which is a half-integer.
Chandrasekhar–Page angular equations
The angular functions satisfy the coupled eigenvalue equations,
:
where
:
and
. Here
is the
angular momentum
In physics, angular momentum (rarely, moment of momentum or rotational momentum) is the rotational analog of linear momentum. It is an important physical quantity because it is a conserved quantity—the total angular momentum of a closed sy ...
per unit mass of the black hole and
is the
rest mass
The invariant mass, rest mass, intrinsic mass, proper mass, or in the case of bound systems simply mass, is the portion of the total mass of an object or system of objects that is independent of the overall motion of the system. More precisely, ...
of the particle. Eliminating
between the foregoing two equations, one obtains
:
The function
satisfies the adjoint equation, that can be obtained from the above equation by replacing
with
. The boundary conditions for these second-order differential equations are that
(and
) be regular at
and
. The eigenvalue problem presented here in general requires numerical integrations for it to be solved. Explicit solutions are available for the case where
.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Chandrasekhar-Page equations
Spinors
Black holes
Ordinary differential equations