Strong Gravity

I shall  analyze three specific general-relativistic  problems in which gravitomagnetism plays important role: the dragging of  magnetic fields  around  rotating black holes, dragging inside a collapsing slowly rotating spherical shell of dust, compared with the dragging by rotating gravitational waves (CQG 34, 205006 (2017), Phys. Rev. D 85 124003, (2012) etc). I shall also briefly show how "instantaneous Machian gauges“ can be useful in the cosmological perturbation theory (Phys. Rev. D 76, 063501 (2007)).

Following the advent of LIGO measurements, it has been recently observed that QFT amplitudes can be used to derive observables appearing in the scattering of two black holes, to very high orders in perturbation theory. Such framework easily fits into the Post-Newtonian and Post-Minkowskian expansions appearing in the treatment of the binary inspiral. In this talk we will review recent progress in this direction for the case of spinning black holes, focusing on radiation and the multipole expansion. From the QFT point of view these are in close relation to long-studied Soft Theorems.

Ground-based gravitational wave observatories have begun to uncover a large number of compact binary coalescences in the universe through gravitational wave signals. I will discuss novel and effective techniques we have developed recently to analyze the publicly available LIGO/Virgo bulk strain data from scratch. Built on simple ideas and easy to implement, those address the questions of template bank construction, signal processing, trigger ranking, and fast parameter estimation. Applying those techniques, we searched for compact binary mergers during the LIGO/Virgo O1 and O2 runs, and detected a few binary black hole mergers in addition to what have been reported in the literature.

The conservation law for the total (orbital plus spin) angular momentum of a Dirac particle in the presence of gravity requires that spacetime is not only curved, but also has a nonzero torsion. The coupling between the spin and torsion in the Einstein–Cartan theory of gravity generates gravitational repulsion at extremely high densities, which prevents a singularity in a black hole and may create there a new, closed, baby universe undergoing one or more nonsingular bounces. We show that quantum particle production caused by an extremely high curvature near a bounce creates enormous amounts of matter and can generate a finite period of inflation. Our scenario has only one parameter, does not depend significantly on the initial conditions, does not involve hypothetical scalar fields, avoids eternal inflation, and predicts plateau-like inflation that is supported by the Planck observations of the cosmic microwave background. This scenario suggests that our Universe may have originated from a nonsingular bounce in a black hole existing in another universe.