Gravitational radiation from collisions at the speed of light: a massless particle falling into a Schwarzschild black hole

We compute spectra, waveforms, angular distribution and total gravitational energy of the gravitiational radiation emitted during the radial infall of a massless particle into a Schwarzschild black hole, Our fully relativistic approach shows that (i) less than 50% of the total energy radiated to infinity is carried by quadrupole waves, (ii) the spectra is flat, and (iii) the zero frequency limit agrees extremely well with a prediction by Smarr. This process may be looked at as the limiting case of collisions between massive particles traveling at nearly the speed of light, by identifying the energy E of the massless particle with m0γ, m0 being the mass of the test particle and y the Lorentz boost parameter. We comment on the implications for the two black hole collision at nearly the speed of light process, where we obtain a 13.3% wave generation efficiency, and compare our results with previous results by D'Eath and Payne. © 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.