Energy Extraction From Gravitational Collapse to Static Black Holes

Abstract

The mass--energy formula of black holes implies that up to 50% of the energy can be extracted from a static black hole. Such a result is reexamined using the recently established analytic formulas for the collapse of a shell and expression for the irreducible mass of a static black hole. It is shown that the efficiency of energy extraction process during the formation of the black hole is linked in an essential way to the gravitational binding energy, the formation of the horizon and the reduction of the kinetic energy of implosion. Here a maximum efficiency of 50% in the extraction of the mass energy is shown to be generally attainable in the collapse of a spherically symmetric shell: surprisingly this result holds as well in the two limiting cases of the Schwarzschild and extreme Reissner-Nordstr\"{o}m space-times. Moreover, the analytic expression recently found for the implosion of a spherical shell onto an already formed black hole leads to a new exact analytic expression for the energy extraction which results in an efficiency strictly less than 100% for any physical implementable process. There appears to be no incompatibility between General Relativity and Thermodynamics at this classical level.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures, to appear on Int. Journ. Mod. Phys.