How to build a black hole bomb

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Fascinating article from SciAm on how the Zel'dovich effect (aka rotational superradiance) might be used by an advanced civilisation to build a bomb powered by a rotating black hole:

According to the theoretical calculations, vacuum-based superradiance would be so faint that it could not be detected—unless, that is, it was somehow amplified. As Zel’dovich described, the rotating body (black hole or metal cylinder) could be encased in mirrors to reflect the amplified radiation back to the rotating body, intensifying it over and over again. As physicists William Press and Saul Teukolsky realized, so much energy could accumulate inside the mirrors that a gigantic explosion would occur. Press and Teukolsky, therefore, referred to the setup as a black hole bomb.

Physicists Have Built a ‘Black Hole Bomb’ in the Laboratory

Astronomical amounts of energy could be extracted from black holes—to build a gigantic bomb, for example. Experts have now implemented this principle in the laboratory

www.scientificamerican.com

Paywalled, although you can sign up to the newsletter to read the article for free.

What struck me as interesting is that the effect doesn't just apply to rotating black holes and has been demonstrated in the laboratory using a rotating metal cylinder.
The abstract from the original paper that describes this experiment:

The amplification and generation of electromagnetic radiation by a rotating metallic or lossy cylinder, first theorized by Zel’dovich in the 1970’s, is tightly connected to the concepts of quantum friction, energy extraction from rotating black holes and runaway mechanisms such as black hole bombs. Despite recent advances including acoustic analogues of the Zel’dovich effect and the observation of a negative resistance in a low-frequency electromagnetic model, actual positive signal amplitude gain, the spontaneous generation of electromagnetic waves and runaway amplification effects have never been experimentally verified. Here, we demonstrate experimentally that a mechanically rotating metallic cylinder not only definitively acts as an amplifier of a rotating electromagnetic field mode but also, when paired with a low-loss resonator, becomes unstable and acts as a generator, seeded only by noise. The system exhibits an exponential runaway amplification of spontaneously generated electromagnetic modes thus demonstrating the electromagnetic analogue of Press and Teukolsky’s ‘black hole bomb’. The exponential amplification from noise supports theoretical investigations into black hole instabilities and is promising for the development of future experiments to observe quantum friction in the form of the Zel’dovich effect seeded by the quantum vacuum.

Creation of a black hole bomb instability in an electromagnetic system

The amplification and generation of electromagnetic radiation by a rotating metallic or lossy cylinder, first theorized by Zeldovich in the 1970s, is tightly connected to the concepts of quantum friction, energy extraction from rotating black holes and runaway mechanisms such as black hole...

arxiv.org

However, as the lab setup generates only millijoules of energy extracted from the rotating body, it's in no danger of exploding.

 

[Will The Serious]

AI Overview:
The Schwarzschild radius, which defines the event horizon, is much smaller than the physical size of the original star. For example, a black hole with the mass of our sun would have a Schwarzschild radius of about 3 kilometers. The sun, however, is about 1.4 million kilometers in diameter.

The mother star was most likely rotating when the black hole formed. That would mean that as the star collapsed, rotational energy would be preserved and it would rotate faster and faster as its radius got smaller and smaller. I would think, therefore, most black holes are rotating at incredible speeds.

Might there be a point at which the electromagnetic field formed from the rotating black hole dragged behind the RPMs of the black hole? Time stops or nearly so, at the event horizon of a black hole. That slowing of time could increase the time needed to realize the energy from a field forming rotation.

If the potential field energy was greater than the actual generated field, what might be the implications? Would slowing the rotation release a burst of that unrealized energy all at once?

I'm not following the mirror configuration. Wouldn't that just send light energy back across the event horizon to be reabsorbed into the black hole?

-Will

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

Funny, IMO, the "Ultimate Torpedo" within the greater Star Trek Universe would be a "Artificial Black Hole WarHead powered by 1x Drop of Red Matter".

Have the UFP create a Torpedo that is a clone of of the Druoda "Series 5 long-range Tactical Armor Unit" w/o the flaws & make improvements while maintaining a similar small foot print & volume.

Make sure you create a clone of the Voth Spatial Displacement tech.

Your torpedo can now "Cloak" & "Cloak Teleport" to be inside the target, trigger the "Artificial Black Hole" War Head and wipe any target out leaving nothing behind.

That means your Torpedo can travel at least 80 ly on it's own, to it's target, have it's own on-board AI, and have it evade any defenses to attack the target.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

A video from Anton Petrov on the subject.

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I can't reliably answer any questions on the feasibility of the device being modelled as I'm not a subject matter expert. My days of studying astrophysics are several decades in the past. for example, I'm not familiar with theories of the electrodynamics of black hole accretion disks and axial jets. I trust the theoreticians' calculations. Of course, any civilisation advanced enough to construct such a weapon hopefully wouldn't.

 

[publiusr]

Shades of the Chaos Weapon

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You might need something similar in case or the Borg or the Vong invade.

The worst weapon (outside of collapsing the vacuum) would involve an actively feeding galactic core black hole.

Knock over a quasar, and those beams sweep through a galaxy’s disk, instead of leaving the galaxy from the poles.

X-ray laser on the way?

Scientists achieve shortest hard X-ray pulses to date

Once only a part of science fiction, lasers are now everyday objects used in research, health care and even just for fun. Previously available only in low-energy light, lasers are now available in wavelengths from microwaves through X-rays, opening a range of different downstream applications.

phys.org

Recent developments in klystron technology for future energy-efficient colliders

The Higgs boson is the most intriguing and unusual object yet discovered by fundamental science. There is no higher experimental priority for particle physics than building an electron–positron collider to produce it copiously and study it precisely.

phys.org

Machine learning helps ease the jitters of high-power lasers

Researchers at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have made a breakthrough in laser technology by using machine learning (ML) to help stabilize a high-power laser.

phys.org

 

[XCV330]

black hole power would be a damned near perfect propulsion system. one could use it as a gravity tractor or explode them as a sort of Super Orion vehicle. You woundn't need to build for mass constraints. you could literally just refit old militray submarines with polystyrene shielding for rad shielding and go with total-loss ECLSS for rapid voyages to the inner planets.

 

[Will The Serious]

How would you keep every living being inside the ship from becoming strawberry jam on the aft walls of the ship when you started that black hole baby up?

-Will

 

[TiberiusKirk]

Interesting.

 

[XCV330]

How would you keep every living being inside the ship from becoming strawberry jam on the aft walls of the ship when you started that black hole baby up?

-Will

stay out of the event horizon.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

How would you keep every living being inside the ship from becoming strawberry jam on the aft walls of the ship when you started that black hole baby up?

-Will

It depends on the yield of the bomblets as for Orion NPP, but in principle, you would use massive shock absorbers in just the same way, tuned for critical damping. Obviously, you'd want to limit the nett acceleration to forego having to use something like the fictional cruciform parasites from Hyperion.

 

[XCV330]

suspending your crew in breathable PFC's could make much of the g load bearable as well. or even just regular water with breathing systems attached.

 

[publiusr]

Maybe these things make themselves:

Could black holes be growing inside stars—silently and forever?

When people think of black holes, they imagine something dramatic: a star exploding in space, collapsing in on itself, and forming a cosmic monster that eats everything around it. But what if black holes didn't always begin with a bang? What if, instead, they started quietly—growing inside...

phys.org

Great—a star that is the equivalent of the wolf-dog from THE THING.

 

[Will The Serious]

"the story is far stranger and more fascinating than we imagined.

The mystery of tiny black holes
Recent gravitational wave detections have hinted at the existence of near- and sub-solar-mass black holes—far lighter than those typically formed in stellar explosions. That's puzzling. According to standard models, stars that small shouldn't be able to collapse into black holes at all. So where are these low-mass black holes coming from?

One intriguing theory suggests that these objects may originate from dark matter, which we still barely understand. This invisible substance permeates the cosmos, shaping galaxies with its gravity but eluding direct detection. Some researchers believe dark matter could slowly accumulate inside stars. Over long timescales, this buildup might trigger a quiet collapse—forming a tiny black hole at the heart of an otherwise normal-looking star."

"the story is far stranger and more fascinating than we imagined." The story is imagined. Real or not, this is all theory without direct experience, so maybe the story is stranger than we imagine, but this story is what we imagine.

"The spin of the white dwarf—how fast it's rotating—plays a decisive role. Three possible outcomes ...

Naked singularity formation: At certain intermediate spins, the collapse can overshoot the formation of an event horizon. The result? A naked singularity—a bare black hole that is not hidden behind a horizon. These objects challenge our understanding of physics and may expose the inner workings of gravity itself. This, in fact, is a new channel to form a near- and sub-solar-mass naked singularity itself."

<NAKED? Get that black hole an event horizon to cover up with, its gravity is exposed.

"if naked singularities are born this way, we might be witnessing violations of cosmic censorship..."

Definitely a violation of censorship,...

-Will