Topology of equatorial timelike circular orbits around stationary black holes

A topological approach has been successfully used to study the properties of the light ring and the null circular orbit in a generic black hole background. However, for the equatorial timelike circular orbit, quite different from the light ring case, its radius is closely dependent of the energy and angular momentum of a test particle. This fact seems to restrict the extension of the topological treatment to the timelike circular orbit. In this paper, we confirm that the angular momentum does not affect the asymptotic behavior of the constructed vector with its zero points denoting the equatorial timelike circular orbits. As a result, a well-behaved topology to characterize the equatorial timelike circular orbits can be constructed. Our study shows that the total topological number of the timelike circular orbits vanishes for a generic black hole, which is dependent of the energy of the particle. Significantly, it reveals that if the timelike circular orbits exist, they always come in pairs for fixed angular momentum. Meanwhile, the stable and unstable timelike circular orbits have positive or negative winding number. Of particular interest is that the marginally stable circular orbit corresponds to the bifurcation point of the zero point of the constructed vector. Moreover, we also examine the case when the particle energy acts as the control parameter. It is shown that there will be topological phase transition when the value of the particle energy is one. Below this value, the timelike circular orbits always come in pairs for fixed energy. Otherwise, we will have one more unstable timelike circular orbit. Such a topological phase transition actually measures whether there are bounded orbits. We further apply the treatment to the Kerr black hole. All the results given in a generic black hole background are exactly reproduced. These strongly indicate that our topological approach can be generalized to the equatorial timelike circular orbits.