BHstabNL · The fate of black holes in high-energy physics -- exploring their dynamical instabilities
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2016-09-29 → 2018-09-28
- EU contribution
- €158,122
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
The fate of black holes in high-energy physics -- exploring their dynamical instabilities
"This is the final report for the Marie-Curie (MC) grant ""BHstabNL"" that ran from 29/09/16 - 31/12/17. I had to terminate it prematurely because I received a prestigious Royal Society University Research Fellowship, a 5-year tenure-track type fellowship in the UK, that could not be postponed beyond 01/01/18. My project focused on nonlinear dynamics of black holes (BHs), that are ideal ""test particles"" to explore gravitational phenomena in the strong field regime. The original proposal aimed at understanding their properties in higher dimensional gravity. However, by the time the fellowship started in late 2016 (proposal was submitted in 09/2014), these specific goals had already been addressed by other groups. Therefore, I slightly adjusted the project to guarantee an original and timely outcome, as agreed upon with my host at UB and with the EC contact person at the time, Y. Vacondios, in a personal discussion. In 2015 LIGO directly detected gravitational waves originating from the collision of two BHs for the first time and, thus, opened an entire new way to unravel the mysteries of our universe. Because LIGO's data stream is dominated by noise, this Nobel-prize winning breakthrough has only been possible thanks to theoretical predictions of the expected gravitational wave signal, called waveforms, requiring a combination of analytic and numerical methods. My objectives have been concerned with the latter, i.e., studying nonlinear BH dynamics in extensions of GR that are well motivated by cosmological models or quantum gravity paradigms such as string theory. These predictions are crucial to probe gravity in its most violent regime and to confront them with gravitational wave observations. These goals are extremely timely and have the exciting potential to answer long standing open questions in cosmology, high-energy and gravitational physics in an entirely new fashion. Modelling the formation and collision of BHs in modified gravity have scarcely been attempted before, with the notable exception of standard scalar-tensor theories. Therefore, my MC project has set the stage to gain important new insight into fundamental physics and has supported the beginning of an exciting new research direction of numerical relativity beyond GR."
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Humankind has always been on a quest to uncover the secrets of our universe and ``detect the inmost force that binds the world and guides its course''. We intend to take important steps towards a more profound understanding of nature's mysteries by employing black holes (BHs).These exciting objects have been predicted by Einstein's general relativity (GR), one of the most successful models to-date to describe our universe,and they also appear in more fundamental theories attempting to marry GR with quantum physics. BHs can be viewed as the point-particle analogue of classical mechanicsand play a key role in vastly different fields ranging from astrophysics and cosmology to high-energy physics. The latter enters the game in the context of higher dimensional gravity and the gauge/gravity duality which offers a unique tool to explore hard-to-tackle phenomena in field theories by investigating gravity in asymptotically anti-de Sitter (AdS) spacetimes.Despite recent progress concerning the properties of BHs in these scenarios, most studies have been restricted to the linear regime. We wish to push these limits beyond the state-of-the-art and investigate the non-linear, dynamical behaviour and stability of BHs in asymptotically AdS and higher dimensional spacetimes, thus opening up an entirely new window to gain insight into the mechanisms that make our world tick.Specifically, we wish to explore the superradiant (SR) instabilities and the recently discovered gravitational turbulence in the former case and the non-linear response of BHs towards both the bar-mode and ultra-spinning instabilities in the latter. With the latest progress on the conceptual, theoretical and methodological level the time is ripe to accomplish these challenging goals by establishing novel techniques combining numerical relativity (NR), ``standard'' perturbative methods and the large-D expansionrecently developed by leading European researchers.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSITAT DE BARCELONA · BarcelonaCoordinatorSpain
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union