Related papers: Observing binary black hole ringdowns by advanced …
Rotating black holes can produce superradiant clouds of ultralight bosons. When the black hole is part of a binary system, its cloud can undergo resonances and ionization. These processes leave a distinct signature on the gravitational…
We develop a search method for gravitational ringing of black holes. The gravitational ringing is due to complex frequency modes called the quasi-normal modes that are excited when a black hole geometry is perturbed. The detection of it…
On September 14, 2015 at 09:50:45 UTC the two detectors of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory simultaneously observed a transient gravitational-wave signal. The signal sweeps upwards in frequency from 35 to 250 Hz with…
Gravitational waves emitted by a ringing black hole allow us to perform precision tests of general relativity in the strong field regime. With improvements to our current gravitational wave detectors and upcoming next-generation detectors,…
It has been recently shown that nonlinear effects emerging at the time of the generation of the quasi-normal modes are necessary to model ringdowns from black hole mergers. In this note, we describe how nonlinerarities also arise when…
General relativity has been tested by many experiments, which, however, almost exclusively probe weak spacetime curvatures. In this thesis, I create two frameworks for testing general relativity in the strong-field regime with observations…
Black-holes are known to span at least 9 orders of magnitude in mass: from the stellar-mass objects observed by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory Scientific Collaboration and Virgo Collaboration, to supermassive…
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…
The relaxation of a distorted black hole to its final state provides important tests of general relativity within the reach of current and upcoming gravitational wave facilities. In black hole perturbation theory, this phase consists of a…
We argue that near-future detections of gravitational waves from merging black hole binaries can test a long-standing proposal, originally due Bekenstein and Mukhanov, that the areas of black hole horizons are quantized in integer multiples…
We characterize the expected statistical errors with which the parameters of black-hole binaries can be measured from gravitational-wave (GW) observations of their inspiral, merger and ringdown by a network of second-generation ground-based…
We investigate how the speed of gravitational waves, $c_{GW}$, can be tested by upcoming black hole ringdown observations. We do so in the context of hairy black hole solutions, where the hair is associated with a new scalar degree of…
Next-generation ground-based gravitational-wave (GW) detectors are expected to detect millions of binary black hole mergers during their operation period. A small fraction ($\sim 0.1 - 1\%$) of them will be strongly lensed by intervening…
Gravitational wave measurements will provide insight into the population of coalescing compact binaries throughout the universe. We describe and demonstrate a flexible parametric method to infer the event rate as a function of compact…
We are living through the dawn of the era of gravitational wave astronomy. Our first glances through this new window upon the sky has revealed a new population of objects. Since it first began observing in late 2015, the advanced Laser…
The gravitational wave signal of binary compact objects has two main contributions at frequencies below the characteristic merger frequency: the gravitational wave signal associated with the early inspiral stage of the binary and the…
Current searches for the gravitational-wave signature of compact binary mergers rely on matched-filtering data from interferometric observatories with sets of modelled gravitational waveforms. These searches currently use model waveforms…
Gravitational wave astronomy has opened an unprecedented window onto tests of gravity and fundamental physics in the strong-field regime. In this study, we examine a series of well-motivated deviations from the classical Kerr solution of…
Supermassive black hole binary mergers generate a stochastic gravitational wave background detectable by pulsar timing arrays. While the amplitude of this background is subject to significant uncertainties, the frequency dependence is a…
The "no-hair" theorem states that astrophysical black holes are fully characterised by just two numbers: their mass and spin. The gravitational-wave emission from a perturbed black-hole consists of a superposition of damped sinusoids, known…