We show that photon spheres of supermassive black holes generate high-frequency stochastic gravitational waves through the photon-graviton conversion. Remarkably, the frequency is universally determined as $m_esqrt{m_e /m_p} simeq 10^{20} text{Hz}$ in terms of the proton mass $m_p$ and the electron mass $m_e$. It turns out that the density parameter of the stochastic gravitational waves $ Omega_{ text{gw}}$ could be $ 10^{-12}$. Since the existence of the gravitational waves from photon spheres is robust, it is worth seeking methods of detecting high-frequency gravitational waves around $10^{20}$Hz.
The grand challenges of contemporary fundamental physics---dark matter, dark energy, vacuum energy, inflation and early universe cosmology, singularities and the hierarchy problem---all involve gravity as a key component. And of all gravitational phenomena, black holes stand out in their elegant simplicity, while harbouring some of the most remarkable predictions of General Relativity: event horizons, singularities and ergoregions. The hitherto invisible landscape of the gravitational Universe is being unveiled before our eyes: the historical direct detection of gravitational waves by the LIGO-Virgo collaboration marks the dawn of a new era of scientific exploration. Gravitational-wave astronomy will allow us to test models of black hole formation, growth and evolution, as well as models of gravitational-wave generation and propagation. It will provide evidence for event horizons and ergoregions, test the theory of General Relativity itself, and may reveal the existence of new fundamental fields. The synthesis of these results has the potential to radically reshape our understanding of the cosmos and of the laws of Nature. The purpose of this work is to present a concise, yet comprehensive overview of the state of the art in the relevant fields of research, summarize important open problems, and lay out a roadmap for future progress.
We study closed photon orbits in spherically-symmetric static solutions of supergravity theories, a Horndeski theory, and a theory of quintessence. These orbits lie in what we shall call a photon sphere (anti-photon sphere) if the orbit is unstable (stable). We show that in all the asymptotically flat solutions we examine that admit a regular event horizon, and whose energy-momentum tensor satisfies the strong energy condition, there is one and only one photon sphere outside the event horizon. We give an example of a Horndeski theory black hole (whose energy-momentum tensor violates the strong energy condition) whose metric admits both a photon sphere and an anti-photon sphere. The uniqueness and non-existence also holds for asymptotically anti-de Sitter solutions in gauged supergravity. The latter also exhibit the projective symmetry that was first discovered for the Schwarzschild-de Sitter metrics: the unparameterised null geodesics are the same as when the cosmological or gauge coupling constant vanishes. We also study the closely related problem of accretion flows by perfect fluids in these metrics. For a radiation fluid, Bondis sonic horizon coincides with the photon sphere. For a general polytropic equation of state this is not the case. Finally we exhibit counterexamples to a conjecture of Hods.
We devise a novel mechanism and for the first time demonstrate that the Higgs model in particle physics can drive the inflation to satisfy the cosmic microwave background observations and simultaneously enhance the curvature perturbations at small scales to explain the abundance of dark matter in our universe in the form of primordial black holes. The production of primordial black holes is accompanied by the secondary gravitational waves induced by the first order Higgs fluctuations which is expected observable by space-based gravitational wave detectors. We propose possible cosmological probes of Higgs field in the future observations for primordial black holes dark matter or stochastic gravitational waves.
Most of compact binary systems are expected to circularize before the frequency of emitted gravitational waves (GWs) enters the sensitivity band of the ground based interferometric detectors. However, several mechanisms have been proposed for the formation of binary systems, which retain eccentricity throughout their lifetimes. Since no matched-filtering algorithm has been developed to extract continuous GW signals from compact binaries on orbits with low to moderate values of eccentricity, and available algorithms to detect binaries on quasi-circular orbits are sub-optimal to recover these events, in this paper we propose a search method for detection of gravitational waves produced from the coalescences of eccentric binary black holes (eBBH). We study the search sensitivity and the false alarm rates on a segment of data from the second joint science run of LIGO and Virgo detectors, and discuss the implications of the eccentric binary search for the advanced GW detectors.
Gravitational waves (GWs) from merging black holes allow for unprecedented probes of strong-field gravity. Testing gravity in this regime requires accurate predictions of gravitational waveform templates in viable extensions of General Relativity. We concentrate on scalar Gauss-Bonnet gravity, one of the most compelling classes of theories appearing as low-energy limit of quantum gravity paradigms, which introduces quadratic curvature corrections to gravity coupled to a scalar field and allows for black hole solutions with scalar-charge. Focusing on inspiralling black hole binaries, we compute the leading-order corrections due to curvature nonlinearities in the GW and scalar waveforms, showing that the new contributions, beyond merely the effect of scalar field, appear at first post-Newtonian order in GWs. We provide ready-to-implement GW polarizations and phasing. Computing the GW phasing in the Fourier domain, we perform a parameter-space study to quantify the detectability of deviations from General Relativity. Our results lay important foundations for future precision tests of gravity with both parametrized and theory-specific searches.