Seeded Hawking radiation?

[Enthalpy]

Hello you all!

 

A bizarre idea, maybe it would fit in the "speculations" section better than in astronomy...

 

Could a gamma ray that arrives near the horizon of a black hole produce a particle pair?

 

To my rudimentary understanding, the electric field of a heavy nucleus separates the particle and antiparticle created there by a gamma ray. Hawking radiation as well separates them, but without the initial gamma ray, just through the strong curvature of the gravitation field there - that is, in my naive and probably wrong representation, the virtual particle falling gains more energy than the rising one thanks to the curvature, and if this gain is big enough, exceeding the particles mass, they can become real, and one can escape the black hole if its kinetic energy suffices.

 

So would an impinging gamma ray help the process, for charged particles?

 

Since some energy comes from the black hole (for the unseeded Hawking radiation, it would be all the energy), a gamma of less than 1022keV could create an electron-positron pair. This means that, after gamma absorption and reemission, the gammas might serve as a catalyst, or at least, that the rate of pair creation can exceed forecasts that base on the population of gammas above 1022keV, if less energy suffices.

 

As some black holes already have gamma rays originating in the accretion ring, this might produce more particles than unseeded Hawking radiation alone, especially for lighter particles like electrons and positrons. Did I read few years ago that an excess was observed?

 

A special case would be a supernova creating a black hole, since the new hole is rather light, and photons are abundent.

 

Thank you!

Marc Schaefer, aka Enthalpy