Vertical epicyclic stability and dissipative settling in a weakly deformed q-metric spacetime

Abstract

We investigate the motion of massive test particles close to the equatorial plane of a weakly deformed q-metric spacetime. Working to first order in the dimensionless quadrupole parameter q, we derive the orbital angular velocity and the vertical epicyclic frequency for equatorial circular orbits while keeping the physical monopole mass fixed. The Schwarzschild limit is recovered at q = 0, whereas a nonzero quadrupole removes the degeneracy between the vertical and azimuthal frequencies already at O(q).

A small phenomenological damping term is then introduced into the linearized vertical equation to describe the gradual approach of a perturbed orbit toward the equatorial plane. In the conservative case, the particle continues to oscillate about this plane without any decrease in amplitude. With damping, the amplitude decays exponentially. The quadrupolar deformation changes the vertical oscillation frequency and, consequently, the number of cycles completed before a specified settling threshold is reached. It does not, however, set the decay timescale, which follows from the adopted damping prescription. Since the coordinate-time damping coefficient is kept fixed in our numerical examples, the trajectories share the same exponential envelope but oscillate at different frequencies.

The comparison with the exact q-metric also provides a direct check of the firstorder approximation. Over the sampled domain |q| ≤ 0.1 and 6 ≤ r/M ≤ 20, the relative error in the vertical frequency remains below 0.34%, while the corresponding frequency ratio is reproduced to better than 0.10%. These results show explicitly how the quadrupolar geometry modifies vertical orbital dynamics within a model in which dissipative settling is introduced independently.