No Arabic abstract
Black Holes are possibly the most enigmatic objects in our Universe. From their detection in gravitational waves upon their mergers, to their snapshot eating at the centres of galaxies, black hole astrophysics has undergone an observational renaissance in the past 4 years. Nevertheless, they remain active playgrounds for strong gravity and quantum effects, where novel aspects of the elusive theory of quantum gravity may be hard at work. In this review article, we provide an overview of the strong motivations for why Quantum Black Holes may be radically different from their classical counterparts in Einsteins General Relativity. We then discuss the observational signatures of quantum black holes, focusing on gravitational wave echoes as smoking guns for quantum horizons (or exotic compact objects), which have led to significant recent excitement and activity. We review the theoretical underpinning of gravitational wave echoes and critically examine the seemingly contradictory observational claims regarding their (non-)existence. Finally, we discuss the future theoretical and observational landscape for unraveling the Quantum Black Holes in the Sky.
With the advent of gravitational wave astronomy, searching for gravitational wave echoes from black holes (BHs) is becoming an interesting probe of their quantum nature near their horizons. Newborn BHs may be strong emitters of echoes, as they accompany large perturbations in the surrounding spacetime upon formation. Utilizing the Quantum Black Hole Seismology framework (Oshita et al. 2020), we study the expected echoes upon BH formation resulting from neutron star mergers and failed supernovae. For BH remnants from neutron star mergers, we evaluate the consistency of these models with the recent claim on the existence of echoes following the neutron star merger event GW170817. We find that the claimed echoes in GW170817, if real, suggest that overtones contribute a significant amount of energy in the ringdown of the remnant BH. We finally discuss the detectability of echoes from failed supernovae by second and third-generation gravitational wave detectors, and find that current (future) detectors constrain physical reflectivity models for events occurring within a few Mpc (a few x 10 Mpc). Detecting such echo signals may significantly constrain the maximum mass and equation of state of neutron stars.
We study the gravitational-wave (GW) signatures of clouds of ultralight bosons around black holes (BHs) in binary inspirals. These clouds, which are formed via superradiance instabilities for rapidly rotating BHs, produce distinct effects in the population of BH masses and spins, and a continuous monochromatic GW signal. We show that the presence of a binary companion greatly enriches the dynamical evolution of the system, most remarkably through the existence of resonant transitions between the growing and decaying modes of the cloud (analogous to Rabi oscillations in atomic physics). These resonances have rich phenomenological implications for current and future GW detectors. Notably, the amplitude of the GW signal from the clouds may be reduced, and in many cases terminated, much before the binary merger. The presence of a boson cloud can also be revealed in the GW signal from the binary through the imprint of finite-size effects, such as spin-induced multipole moments and tidal Love numbers. The time dependence of the clouds energy density during the resonance leads to a sharp feature, or at least attenuation, in the contribution from the finite-size terms to the waveforms. The observation of these effects would constrain the properties of putative ultralight bosons through precision GW data, offering new probes of physics beyond the Standard Model.
Angular momentum plays very important roles in the formation of PBHs in the matter-dominated phase if it lasts sufficiently long. In fact, most collapsing masses are bounced back due to centrifugal force, since angular momentum significantly grows before collapse. As a consequence, most of the formed PBHs are rapidly rotating near the extreme value $a_{*}=1$, where $a_{*}$ is the nondimensional Kerr parameter at their formation. The smaller the density fluctuation $sigma_{H}$ at horizon entry is, the stronger the tendency towards the extreme rotation. Combining the effect of angular momentum with that of anisotropy, we estimate the black hole production rate. We find that the production rate suffers from suppression dominantly due to angular momentum for a smaller value of $sigma_{H}$, while due to anisotrpopy for a larger value of $sigma_{H}$. We argue that matter domination significantly enhances the production of PBHs despite the suppression. If the matter-dominated phase does not last so long, the effect of the finite duration significantly suppresses PBH formation and weakens the tendency towards large spins. (abridged)
With approximately 50 binary black hole events detected by LIGO/Virgo to date and many more expected in the next few years, gravitational-wave astronomy is shifting from individual-event analyses to population studies. We perform a hierarchical Bayesian analysis on the GWTC-2 catalog by combining several astrophysical formation models with a population of primordial black holes. We compute the Bayesian evidence for a primordial population compared to the null hypothesis, and the inferred fraction of primordial black holes in the data. We find that these quantities depend on the set of assumed astrophysical models: the evidence for primordial black holes against an astrophysical-only multichannel model is decisively favored in some scenarios, but it is significantly reduced in the presence of a dominant stable-mass-transfer isolated formation channel. The primordial channel can explain mergers in the upper mass gap such as GW190521, but (depending on the astrophysical channels we consider) a significant fraction of the events could be of primordial origin even if we neglected GW190521. The tantalizing possibility that LIGO/Virgo may have already detected black holes formed after inflation should be verified by reducing uncertainties in astrophysical and primordial formation models, and it may ultimately be confirmed by third-generation interferometers.
Using gravitational wave observations to search for deviations from general relativity in the strong-gravity regime has become an important research direction. Chern Simons (CS) gravity is one of the most frequently studied parity-violating models of strong gravity. It is known that the Kerr black-hole is not a solution for CS gravity. At the same time, the only rotating solution available in the literature for dynamical CS (dCS) gravity is the slow-rotating case most accurately known to quadratic order in spin. In this work, for the slow-rotating case (accurate to first order in spin), we derive the linear perturbation equations governing the metric and the dCS field accurate to linear order in spin and quadratic order in the CS coupling parameter ($alpha$) and obtain the quasi-normal mode (QNM) frequencies. After confirming the recent results of Wagle et al. (2021), we find an additional contribution to the eigenfrequency correction at the leading perturbative order of $alpha^2$. Unlike Wagle et al., we also find corrections to frequencies in the polar sector. We compute these extra corrections by evaluating the expectation values of the perturbative potential on unperturbed QNM wavefunctions along a contour deformed into the complex-$r$ plane. For $alpha=0.1 M^2$, we obtain the ratio of the imaginary parts of the dCS correction to the GR correction in the first QNM frequency (in the polar sector) to be $0.263$ implying significant change. For the $(2,2)-$mode, the dCS corrections make the imaginary part of the first QNM of the fundamental mode less negative, thereby decreasing the decay rate. Our results, along with future gravitational wave observations, can be used to test for dCS gravity and further constrain the CS coupling parameters. [abridged]