Singularities, such as those found at the heart of black holes, when density becomes infinite, are frequently described as areas where physics ‘breaks down.’ However, this does not rule out the possibility of ‘anything,’ and physicists are curious as to which laws might be broken and how.
Now, a team of researchers from Imperial College London, the Cockcroft Institute, and Lancaster University has proposed a way for singularities to break the law of charge conservation. Annalen der Physik published their theory.
Co-author Professor Martin McCall, from the Department of Physics at Imperial, said:
“Physics breaks down at a singularity’ is one of the most famous statements in pop physics. But by showing how this might actually happen, we take aim at one of the most cherished laws of physics: the conservation of charge.”
According to the law of conservation of charge, the total electric charge of any isolated system, including the entire Universe, never changes. This indicates that whether negatively or positively charged particles enter an area, an identical number of charged particles must leave.
This has been demonstrated at the atomic level: in tests like the Large Hadron Collider, the identical amount of negatively and positively charged particles are always produced or destroyed.
The team has now demonstrated that transitory singularities such as black holes that form and then vanish could destroy charge when they reach the end of their lives by changing standard physics equations to incorporate axions, a candidate for dark matter.
You can imagine creating an ‘axion bomb’ that holds charge by combining coupled axion and magnetic fields; and then dropping it into an evaporating black hole. As the construction shrinks and disappears into the singularity, it takes an electrical charge with it. It is the combination of a temporary singularity and a newly proposed type of axion field that is crucial to its success.
Jonathan Gratus
Axions are hypothesized particles that could explain dark matter, the Universe’s ‘missing’ 85 percent of matter. Their expected features could generate a field that interacts with electromagnetic fields, which have been studied by physicists for decades and are described by a set of equations known as Maxwell’s equations.
The researchers discovered how to make or destroy charge by employing an area of mathematics known as differential geometry, thus defying the laws of charge conservation in the Universe.
Co-author Jonathan Gratus said: “You can imagine creating an ‘axion bomb’ that holds charge by combining coupled axion and magnetic fields; and then dropping it into an evaporating black hole. As the construction shrinks and disappears into the singularity, it takes an electrical charge with it. It is the combination of a temporary singularity and a newly proposed type of axion field that is crucial to its success.”
Co-author Dr. Paul Kinsler, from the Department of Physics at Imperial, said:
“There are also philosophical implications. Although people often like to say that physics ‘breaks down’, here we show that although exotic phenomena might occur, what actually happens is nevertheless constrained by the still-working laws of physics around the singularity.”
The axion phenomena, according to the researchers, would only occur under extreme conditions that are now impossible to replicate in a lab, but future breakthroughs in powerful laser beams could allow the theory to be tested in a terrestrial setting.
