Astrophysical black holes as natural laboratories for fundamental physics and strong-field gravity
Abstract
Astrophysical tests of general relativity belong to two categories: 1) "internal", i.e. consistency tests within the theory (for example, tests that astrophysical black holes are indeed described by the Kerr solution and its perturbations), or 2) "external", i.e. tests of the many proposed extensions of the theory. I review some ways in which astrophysical black holes can be used as natural laboratories for both "internal" and "external" tests of general relativity. The examples provided here (ringdown tests of the black hole "no-hair" theorem, bosonic superradiant instabilities in rotating black holes and gravitational-wave tests of massive scalar-tensor theories) are shamelessly biased towards recent research by myself and my collaborators. Hopefully this colloquial introduction aimed mainly at astrophysicists will convince skeptics (if there are any) that space-based detectors will be crucial to study fundamental physics through gravitational-wave observations.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1302.5702,
title = {Astrophysical black holes as natural laboratories for fundamental physics and strong-field gravity},
author = {Emanuele Berti},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1302.5702},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
17 pages, 3 figures, prepared for the Proceedings of the 26th Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics; revision fixes typos in response to referee's comments, some references added