Spacetime embedding diagrams for spherically symmetric black holes (Q1424828)

The authors show that it is possible to embed the 1+1-dimensional reduction of certain spherically symmetric black hole spacetimes into 2+1-dimensional Minkowski space. The resulting embedding diagrams directly show the behavior of radial geodesics (both timelike and spacelike) and other dynamic world lines in the original spacetime. Diagrams are constructed for the de-Sitter, Schwarzschild-de Sitter, Schwarzschild-anti de Sitter, and Reissner-Nordström spacetimes whose geometries allow for such embeddings. The authors analyze various features of the embedding construction, deriving the general conditions under which this procedure provides a smooth embedding. These conditions yield an embedding constant related to the surface gravity of the relevant horizon. The diagrams described here include regions on both sides of a horizon. These cases are chosen in order to explore the embedding process for spherically symmetric spacetimes with multiple horizons. In general, this construction is unable to smoothly embed a region of the spacetime containing both horizons. Instead, one must embed the spacetime in patches containing only one horizon. For the Reissner-Nordström case, a smooth embedding is only obtained for the outer horizon, and even then only when \(\mathcal Q<\sqrt{8/9}M\).