Tilted magnetic fields make black holes better electron-positron factories

When a spinning black hole sits inside a magnetic field that's tilted relative to its rotation axis, the region where the electric field is strong enough to rip electron-positron pairs out of the vacuum changes shape — splitting into several distinct lobes that shift with the tilt angle. Misaligned fields turn out to require a lower minimum magnetic field strength to trigger pair creation than perfectly aligned ones. The result matters for gamma-ray bursts, where this vacuum breakdown process is thought to supply the enormous energies observed.