Resonance crossing of a charged body in a magnetized Kerr background: An analog of extreme mass ratio inspiral

Abstract

We investigate resonance crossings of a charged body moving around a Kerr black hole immersed in an external homogeneous magnetic field. This system can serve as an electromagnetic analog of a weakly nonintegrable extreme mass ratio inspiral (EMRI). In particular, the presence of the magnetic field renders the conservative part of the system nonintegrable in the Liouville sense, while the electromagnetic self-force causes the charged body to inspiral. By studying the system without the self-force, we show the existence of an approximate Carter-like constant and discuss how resonances grow as a function of the perturbation parameter. Then, we apply the electromagnetic self-force to investigate crossings of these resonances during an inspiral. Averaging the energy and angular momentum losses during crossings allows us to employ an adiabatic approximation for them. We demonstrate that such adiabatic approximation provides results qualitatively equivalent to the instantaneous self-force evolution, which indicates that the adiabatic approximation may describe the resonance crossing with sufficiently accuracy in EMRIs.