Completing the Penrose Process without a Horizon

Abstract

In its standard black-hole realization, the Penrose process uses an event horizon to remove a negative-energy fragment. We show that, at the kinematic level, horizon absorption can instead be replaced by confinement within a compact ergoregion, without imposing an absorbing or reflecting inner boundary. For a broad class of regular, stationary, axisymmetric, asymptotically flat horizonless spacetimes, we prove that every smooth connected component of the spatial ergosurface is a compact torus, independently of the field equations and matter content. Future-directed geodesics with negative Killing energy encounter a forbidden neighborhood of each such boundary component and are therefore confined. We derive an exterior no-barrier condition and identify an open set of on-shell, future-directed, four-momentum-conserving splittings producing both a confined negative-energy fragment and an amplified partner. Under equatorial reflection symmetry, once the latter enters the exterior channel on an outward branch, it necessarily reaches infinity. A rotating boson star explicitly realizes the complete process without a horizon.