Related papers: Probing quantum gravity using high-energy astrophy…
We study the evolution of light spectator fields in an asymmetric polynomial potential. During inflation, stochastic fluctuations displace the spectator field from the global minimum of its potential, populating the false vacuum state and…
The origin of observed extremely high energy cosmic rays remains an astrophysical enigma. We show that a single evaporating primordial black hole should produce 8.5*10^14 particles over a 10^20 eV threshold. This emission results from…
Formation of primordial black holes from inflationary fluctuations is accompanied by a scalar induced gravitational wave background. We perform a Bayesian search of such background in the data from Advanced LIGO and Virgo's first, second…
Einstein's theory of gravity admits a low energy effective quantum field description from which predictions beyond classical general relativity can be drawn. As gravitational wave detectors improve, one may ask whether non-classical…
We investigate the effects of the Gauss-Bonnet (GB) gravitational trace anomaly on the circular motion of test particles around black holes (BHs) and its implications for quasi-periodic oscillations (QPOs) in various theoretical models.…
We investigate the propagation of gravitational waves on a black hole background within the low energy effective field theory of gravity, where effects from heavy fields are captured by higher dimensional curvature operators. Depending on…
Quantum fluctuations in the background geometry of a black hole are shown to affect the propagation of matter states falling into the black hole in a foliation that corresponds to observations purely outside the horizon. A state that starts…
Primordial black holes are under intense scrutiny since the detection of gravitational waves from mergers of solar-mass black holes in 2015. More recently, the development of numerical tools and the precision observational data have…
The merger rate of black hole binaries inferred from the detections in the first Advanced LIGO science run, implies that a stochastic background produced by a cosmological population of mergers will likely mask the primordial…
Since Stephen Hawking discovered that black holes emit thermal radiation, black holes have become the theoretical laboratories for testing our ideas on quantum gravity. This dissertation is devoted to the study of singularities, the…
Since the seminal work of Penrose (1969) and Blandford & Znajek (1977), it has been realized that black hole spin may be an important energy source in astrophysics. The radio-loud/radio-quiet dichotomy in the AGN population is usually…
Gravitational waves from extreme mass-ratio inspirals (EMRIs) will enable sub-percent measurements of massive black hole parameters and provide access to the demographics of compact objects in galactic nuclei. During the LISA mission,…
For a variety of on-going and planned gravitational-wave (GW) experiments, we study expected constraints on the fraction ($f_{\rm PBH}$) of primordial black holes (PBHs) in dark matter by evaluating the energy-density spectra of two kinds…
We observe spontaneous Hawking radiation, stimulated by quantum vacuum fluctuations, emanating from an analogue black hole in an atomic Bose-Einstein condensate. Correlations are observed between the Hawking particles outside the black hole…
The emergence of quantum-gravity induced corrective terms for the probability of emission of a particle from a black hole in the Parikh-Wilczek tunneling framework is studied. It is shown, in particular, how corrections might arise from…
The recent first detection of gravitational waves (GWs) from binary black hole mergers has spurred a renewed interest in possible deviations from General Relativity (GR), since they could be detected in the GWs emitted by such systems. Of…
The KM3NeT experiment has recently observed a neutrino with an energy around 100PeV, and IceCube has detected five neutrinos with energies above 1PeV. While there are no known astrophysical sources, exploding primordial black holes could…
Searches for gravitational wave echoes in the aftermath of mergers and/or formation of astrophysical black holes have recently opened a novel and surprising window into the quantum nature of their horizons. Similar to astro- and…
The recent detection of the gravitational wave source GW150914 by the LIGO collaboration motivates a speculative source for the origin of ultrahigh energy cosmic rays as a possible byproduct of the immense energies achieved in black hole…
One of the most luminous explosions detected, gamma-ray bursts, especially the so-called long-duration bursts, most probably consist of an intrinsic core-collapse to a black hole inside a super massive star. We point out that this collapse…