Mining Energy from a Black Hole by Strings

Abstract

We discuss how cosmic strings can be used to mine energy from black holes. A string attached to the black hole gives rise to an additional channel for the energy release. It is demonstrated that when a string crosses the event horizon, its transverse degrees of freedom are thermally excited and thermal string perturbations propagate along the string to infinity. The internal metric induced on the 2D worldsheet of the static string crossing the horizon describes a 2D black hole. For this reason thermal radiation of string excitations propagating along the string can be interpreted as Hawking radiation of the 2D black hole. It is shown that the rate of energy emission through the string channel is of the same order of magnitude as the bulk radiation of the black hole. Thus, for N strings attached to the black hole the efficiency of string channels is increased by factor N. We discuss restrictions on N which exist because of the finite thickness of strings, the gravitational backreaction and quantum fluctuations. Our conclusion is that the energy emission rate by strings can be increased as compared to the standard emission in the bulk by the factor 10^3 for GUT strings and up to the factor 10^{31} for electroweak strings.