Electromagnetic radiation from collisions at almost the speed of light: An extremely relativistic charged particle falling into a Schwarzschild black hole

We investigate the electromagnetic radiation released during the high energy collision of a charged point particle with a four-dimensional Schwarzschild black hole. We show that the spectra is flat, and well described by a classical calculation. We also compare the total electromagnetic and gravitational energies emitted, and find that the former is suppressed in relation to the latter for very high energies. These results could apply to the astrophysical world in the case that charged stars and small charged black holes are out there colliding into large black holes, and to a very high energy collision experiment in a four-dimensional world. In this latter scenario the calculation is to be used for the moments just after black hole formation, when the collision of charged debris with the newly formed black hole is certainly expected. Since the calculation is four dimensional, it does not directly apply to TeV-scale gravity black holes, as these inhabit a world of six to eleven dimensions, although our results should qualitatively hold when extrapolated with some care to higher dimensions.