No Arabic abstract
Gravitational-wave (GW) observations of binary black holes offer the best probes of the relativistic, strong-field regime of gravity. Gravitational radiation, in the leading order is quadrupolar. However, non-quadrupole (higher-order) modes make appreciable contribution to the radiation from binary black holes with large mass ratios and misaligned spins. The multipolar structure of the radiation is fully determined by the intrinsic parameters (masses and spin angular momenta of the companion black holes) of a binary in quasi-circular orbit. Following our previous work cite{Dhanpal:2018ufk}, we develop multiple ways of testing the consistency of the observed GW signal with the expected multipolar structure of radiation from binary black holes in general relativity. We call this a no-hair test of binary black holes as this is similar to testing the no-hair theorem for isolated black holes through mutual consistency of the quasi-normal mode spectrum. We use Bayesian inference on simulated GW signals that are consistent/inconsistent with binary black holes in GR to demonstrate the power of the proposed tests. We also make estimate systematic errors arising as a result of neglecting companion spins.
The recent LIGO detection of gravitational waves from black-hole binaries offers the exciting possibility of testing gravitational theories in the previously inaccessible strong-field, highly relativistic regime. While the LIGO detections are so far consistent with the predictions of General Relativity, future gravitational-wave observations will allow us to explore this regime to unprecedented accuracy. One of the generic predictions of theories of gravity that extend General Relativity is the violation of the strong equivalence principle, i.e. strongly gravitating bodies such as neutron stars and black holes follow trajectories that depend on their nature and composition. This has deep consequences for gravitational-wave emission, which takes place with additional degrees of freedom besides the tensor polarizations of General Relativity. I will briefly review the formalism needed to describe these extra emission channels, and show that binary black-hole observations probe a set of gravitational theories that are largely disjoint from those that are testable with binary pulsars or neutron stars.
We propose a novel method to test the binary black hole (BBH) nature of compact binaries detectable by gravitational wave (GW) interferometers and hence constrain the parameter space of other exotic compact objects. The spirit of the test lies in the no-hair conjecture for black holes where all properties of a black hole are characterised by the mass and the spin of the black hole. The method relies on observationally measuring the quadrupole moments of the compact binary constituents induced due to their spins. If the compact object is a Kerr black hole (BH), its quadrupole moment is expressible solely in terms of its mass and spin. Otherwise, the quadrupole moment can depend on additional parameters (such as equation of state of the object). The higher order spin effects in phase and amplitude of a gravitational waveform, which explicitly contains the spin-induced quadrupole moments of compact objects, hence uniquely encodes the nature of the compact binary. Thus we argue that an independent measurement of the spin-induced quadrupole moment of the compact binaries from GW observations can provide a unique way to distinguish binary BH systems from binaries consisting of exotic compact objects.
In models of minicharged dark matter associated with a hidden $U(1)$ symmetry, astrophysical black holes may acquire a dark charge, in such a way that the inspiral dynamics of binary black holes can be formally described by an Einstein-Maxwell theory. Charges enter the gravitational wave signal predominantly through a dipole term, but their effect is known to effectively first post-Newtonian order in the phase, which enables measuring the size of the charge-to-mass ratios, $|q_i/m_i|$, $i = 1,2$, of the individual black holes in a binary. We set up a Bayesian analysis to discover, or constrain, dark charges on binary black holes. After testing our framework in simulations, we apply it to selected binary black hole signals from the second Gravitational Wave Transient Catalog (GWTC-2), namely those with low masses so that most of the signal-to-noise ratio is in the inspiral regime. We find no evidence for charges on the black holes, and place typical 1-$sigma$ bounds on the charge-to-mass ratios of $|q_i/m_i| lesssim 0.2 - 0.3$.
In Einstein-Maxwell theory black holes are uniquely determined by their mass, their charge and their angular momentum. This is no longer true in Einstein-Yang-Mills theory. We discuss sequences of neutral and charged SU(N) Einstein-Yang-Mills black holes, which are static spherically symmetric and asymptotically flat, and which carry Yang-Mills hair. Furthermore, in Einstein-Maxwell theory static black holes are spherically symmetric. We demonstrate that, in contrast, SU(2) Einstein-Yang-Mills theory possesses a sequence of black holes, which are static and only axially symmetric.
Current template-based gravitational wave searches for compact binary coalescences (CBC) use waveform models that neglect the higher order modes content of the gravitational radiation emitted, considering only the quadrupolar $(ell,|m|)=(2,2)$ modes. We study the effect of such a neglection for the case of aligned-spin CBC searches for equal-spin (and non-spinning) binary black holes in the context of t