McGehee regularization of general SO(3)-invariant potentials and applications to stationary and spherically symmetric spacetimes

The McGehee regularization is a method to study the singularity at the origin of the dynamical system describing a point particle in a plane moving under the action of a power-law potential. It was used by Belbruno and Pretorius (2011 Class. Quantum Grav. 28 195007) to perform a dynamical system regularization of the singularity at the center of the motion of massless test particles in the Schwarzschild spacetime. In this paper, we generalize the McGehee transformation so that we can regularize the singularity at the origin of the dynamical system describing the motion of causal geodesics (timelike or null) in any stationary and spherically symmetric spacetime of Kerr-Schild form. We first show that the geodesics for both massive and massless particles can be described globally in the Kerr-Schild spacetime as the motion of a Newtonian point particle in a suitable radial potential and study the conditions under which the central singularity can be regularized using an extension of the McGehee method. As an example, we apply these results to causal geodesics in the Schwarzschild and Reissner-Nordstrom spacetimes. Interestingly, the geodesic trajectories in the whole maximal extension of both spacetimes can be described by a single two-dimensional phase space with non-trivial topology. This topology arises from the presence of excluded regions in the phase space determined by the condition that the tangent vector of the geodesic be causal and future directed.