Scattering of massless scalar waves by higher-dimensional regular black holes in general relativity coupled to nonlinear electrodynamics
We study the scattering of planar massless scalar waves by the family of higher-dimensional regular black holes in general relativity coupled to nonlinear electrodynamics, which unifies the Bardeen and Hayward models in any dimension. The scalar field is a neutral test field that propagates in the bulk, and in the geometric-optics limit, its rays are the null geodesics of the spacetime, so that the unstable circular null geodesics of the background geometry control the scattering. We combine the classical scattering of null geodesics, the glory approximation, which we generalize to $D$ dimensions, and the partial-wave analysis in $D=5,6,7$. We show that at a fixed frequency, the wave cross section diverges in the forward direction as $θ^{-4}$ in any dimension, with a coefficient fixed by the mass, while the steeper classical law $θ^{-(D-2)^{2}/(D-3)}$ appears only at larger angles and higher frequencies. The charge parameter decreases the critical and the glory impact parameters and widens the glory fringes, and in higher dimensions, the glory pattern has fewer and wider fringes and a weaker backward intensity. For the matched configurations studied here, backward intensity and low-frequency absorption provide the clearest differences, while the intermediate-to-high-frequency spectra are close.