Strong Gravity

In this talk I will outline recent attempts to probe black holes in the strong gravity regime. The access to gravitational wave emission from binary black hole mergers and images of supermassive black holes allow for new tests of general relativity. After reviewing recent activities, I will outline how quasi-normal modes and shadow images can be used to study possible deviations from general relativity. Finally, I will discuss open problems that need to be addressed in the future.

I will discuss the detailed process by which slow contraction smooths and flattens the universe using an improved numerical relativity code that accepts initial conditions with non-perturbative deviations from homogeneity and isotropy along two independent spatial directions. Contrary to common descriptions of the early universe, I will show that the geometry first rapidly converges to an inhomogeneous, spatially-curved, and anisotropic ultralocal state in which all spatial gradient contributions to the equations of motion decrease as an exponential in time to negligible values. This is followed by a second stage in which the geometry converges to a homogeneous, spatially flat, and isotropic spacetime. In particular, the decay appears to follow the same history whether the entire spacetime or only parts of it are smoothed by the end of slow contraction.

Zoom Link: https://pitp.zoom.us/j/95441238892?pwd=TUh4Mjh1MHJ6TDNCL0V1NUk5WWFZQT09

Black hole spectroscopy is a powerful tool to probe the Kerr nature of astrophysical compact objects and their environment. The observation of multiple ringdown modes in gravitational waveforms could soon lead to high-precision gravitational spectroscopy, thus it is critical to understand if the quasinormal mode spectrum itself is stable against perturbations. In this talk, I will review the pseudospectrum, a mathematical tool which can shed light on the spectral stability of quasinormal modes, and discuss its novel applications in black holes and exotic compact objects. Furthermore, I will demonstrate that quasinormal spectra generically suffer from spectral instabilities and will argue how such
behavior may affect black hole spectroscopy.

Zoom Link: https://pitp.zoom.us/j/99111452809?pwd=bVp6TVdYQkJzU0Mvd2MxY2piclMzUT09

With the release of the third gravitational wave transient catalog (GWTC-3), the LIGO and Virgo detectors have reported nearly 100 gravitational waves from colliding black holes and neutron stars. Among these detections there have been numerous surprises, such as the heavy GW190521, the confidently asymmetric GW190412, and the exceptionally small secondary of GW190814. In addition to analyses of each individual sources' properties, such as their masses and spins, one can also summarize the collective properties of the colliding objects as population probability distributions over these parameters. As catalog sizes continue to grow, it enables both finer grained investigations into the population properties of merging compact objects, and robustly testing GR in the strong gravity regime. In this talk I will present data driven statistical models to look for deviations to underlying theoretical expectations, both for individual gravitational waveform models and population models describing the astrophysical distributions of merging compact binaries. I will present the results of an analysis using this novel data-driven model on the 11 compact binary mergers in GWTC-1, then move towards hierarchical models, inferring the binary black hole mass distribution with similar data-driven methods. I will conclude with showing new results from the LVK population analyses of GWTC-3 and motivate the need towards developing more data-driven statistical models for the incoming swath of observations expected in the fourth observing run that, as we have seen, will likely continue to further challenge theoretical expectations.
 

Guided by the principles of effective field theory (EFT), I will discuss three avenues to constrain physics beyond General Relativity with black-hole observations.

1) Shadows: Without specifying any particular gravitational dynamics, I will discuss image features of black-hole shadows in general parameterizations and their relation to fundamental-physics principles like (i) regularity (no remaining curvature singularity), (ii) simplicity (a single new-physics scale), and (iii) locality (a new-physics scale set by local curvature).

2) Stability: Specifying the linearized dynamics around black-hole spacetimes determines the onset of potential instabilities and connects to the ringdown phase of gravitational waves. I will delineate how said instabilities can constrain the EFT of gravity, theories of low-scale dark energy, as well as ultralight dark matter.

3) Nonlinear evolution: The larger the probed curvature scale, the tighter the constraints on new gravitational physics. Making full use of experimental data, thus relies on predictions in the nonlinear regime of binary mergers. I will present recent progress towards achieving stable numerical evolution for the EFT of gravity up to quadratic order in curvature.

Zoom Link: https://pitp.zoom.us/j/98276687334?pwd=UnM2dElacWNtempQUHJMNVlaNHgyUT09

The era of multi-messenger astronomy is well and truly upon us, with 90 compact binaries observed since the Advanced LIGO detectors saw first light in 2015. Despite our very own cosmic backyard, the Milky Way, being ripe with prospective sources for ground-based gravitational wave detectors, the closest source detected thus far (GW170817, the famed binary neutron star merger) was at a distance of 40 Mpc. In this talk, I will outline a number of prospective Galactic multi-messenger sources, and discuss several ways in which their detection over the next twenty years can be improved through both experimental and analytical techniques. 

Zoom Link: https://pitp.zoom.us/j/93664322641?pwd=VUoxbmFGZE1KczJ1RU1MR09TQ05Ldz09

Accurate waveform models are crucial for gravitational-wave (GW) data analysis, and since numerical-relativity waveforms are computationally expensive, it is important to improve the analytical approximations for the binary dynamics. The post-Newtonian (PN) approximation is most suited for describing the inspiral of comparable-mass binaries, which are the main sources for ground-based GW detectors. In this talk, I discuss a method for deriving PN results valid for arbitrary mass ratios from first-order self-force results, by exploiting the simple mass dependence of the scattering angle in the post-Minkowskian expansion. I present results for the spin-orbit dynamics up to the fourth-subleading PN order (5.5PN) and the spin-spin dynamics up to the third-subleading PN order (5PN). I also discuss implications for the first law of binary mechanics.

Zoom Link: https://pitp.zoom.us/j/92861625861?pwd=cHpXUlM1d01pc09mNGhhQVZxRHBiQT09

Mergers of compact objects are among the most violent events in the Universe. At close separations, compact binaries emit gravitational waves, releasing enormous amounts of energy until they merge. When matter is present in the system, the event might be accompanied by electromagnetic emission, which can span the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Multi-messenger observations by gravitational-wave detectors and electromagnetic telescopes have opened a new avenue to understand the nature of spacetime and its interaction with matter. In this talk, I will discuss recent efforts to connect first-principle calculations with the electromagnetic radiation emitted in compact binary mergers through general-relativistic magnetohydrodynamic simulations. In particular, I will focus on the relativistic outflows produced in binary neutron star systems and on electromagnetic signatures of supermassive binary black-hole mergers.

The growing catalog of gravitational wave signals from binary black hole mergers has allowed us to probe the properties of these compact objects more precisely than ever before. In particular, binary black hole spin measurements have the potential to reveal the formation channels of these systems. An accurate and precise measurement of the spins of individual merging black holes is required to model their population-level distributions. In this talk, I will discuss recent work on the measurability of individual black hole spins focusing on those in heavy binaries. I will also present novel spin parameterizations that facilitate the study of specific features of binary black hole evolutionary histories. I will contextualize these individual spin measurements within the observed population of binary black holes and conclude by presenting the latest LIGO-Virgo results for the black hole spin distribution.

Many cosmological scenarios beyond the Standard Model lead to the formation of a network of cosmic strings. In this talk, I will review how these models lead in a natural way to the production of a stochastic gravitational wave background and how this signal could account for the recently reported results from the NANOGrav collaboration. Finally, we will explain how future observations could allow us to confirm this interpretation of the NANOGrav data.

In this talk, I will present how gravitational-wave (GW) measurements can be utilized to search for ultralight bosons and primordial black holes (PBHs), which can be the keys to some of the unsolved questions about our Universe. In the first half, I will discuss the current constraints on excluding the mass of ultralight bosons around ~10^-13 eV, based on the mass-spin measurements of BBHs from the second GW catalog (GWTC-2). These constraints are driven by the phenomenology called “superradiance”, which extracts the angular momentum of a rapidly spinning black hole to form a slowly spinning black hole-boson cloud system. In the second half, I will illustrate how the distance measurements of very high-redshift BBHs made by the next-generation GW detectors may provide cleaner hints or constraints for the existence of PBHs in the future.

Zoom Link: https://pitp.zoom.us/j/95012157554?pwd=UWdBZ1FOTSt2dVlBaS81MjRLbVBvUT09