Related papers: The Black Hole Mass Gap as a New Probe of Millicha…
Gravitational wave (GW) detections of binary black hole (BH) mergers have begun to sample the cosmic BH mass distribution. The evolution of single stellar cores predicts a gap in the BH mass distribution due to pair-instability supernova…
Traditionally, the pair instability (PI) mass gap is located between 50\,and 130\,$M_{\odot}$, with stellar mass black holes (BHs) expected to "pile up" towards the lower PI edge. However, this lower PI boundary is based on the assumption…
Minicharged particles (mCPs), hypothetical free particles with effective electric charges much smaller than the elementary charge, $e$, offer a valuable probe of dark sectors and fundamental physics through several clear experimental…
It is postulated that heavy dark matter $\phi$ with a mass on the order of TeV, once captured by the Earth, can decay into relativistic milli-charged particles (MCPs). These MCPs are potentially detectable at the IceCube neutrino telescope.…
In standard stellar evolution, stars with masses ranging from approximately $150$ to $240 M_\odot$ are expected to evolve to a pair instability supernova with no black hole (BH) remnant. This evolutionary behavior leads to a predicted gap…
Models of pair-instability supernovae (PISNe) predict a gap in black hole (BH) masses between $\sim 45M_\odot-120M_\odot$, which is referred to as the upper BH mass-gap. With the advent of gravitational-wave astrophysics it has become…
We study the evolution of heavy stars ($M\ge40{\rm M}_\odot$) undergoing pair-instability in the presence of annihilating dark matter. Focusing on the scenario where the dark matter is in capture-annihilation equilibrium, we model the…
A search for microscopic black hole production and decay in pp collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 7 TeV has been conducted by the CMS Collaboration at the LHC, using a data sample corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 35…
We investigate the effects of black hole mergers in star clusters on the black hole mass function. As black holes are not produced in pair-instability supernovae, it is suggested that there is a dearth of high mass stellar black holes. This…
The recent detection of GW190521 stimulated ideas on how to populate the predicted black hole pair-instability mass gap. One proposed scenario is the dynamical merger of two stars below the pair instability regime forming a star with a…
Gravitational-wave observations reveal that the rate of merging black holes drops by $\sim2$ orders of magnitude from component masses $\sim 10\,M_{\odot}$ to $\sim 15\,M_{\odot}$. The increased compactness of the black hole progenitor…
It is firmly established that the stellar mass distribution is smooth, covering the range 0.1-100 Msun. It is to be expected that the masses of the ensuing compact remnants correlate with the masses of their progenitor stars, and thus it is…
The relic abundance of light millicharged particles (MCPs) with the electric charge $e' = 5\cdot 10^{-5} e$ and with the mass slightly below or above the electron mass is calculated. The abundance depends on the mass ratio $\eta=m_X/m_e$…
Binary neutron-star mergers will predominantly produce black-hole remnants of mass $\sim 3-4\,M_{\odot}$, thus populating the putative \emph{low mass gap} between neutron stars and stellar-mass black holes. If these low-mass black holes are…
At the end of their lives the most massive stars collapse into black holes (BHs). The detection of an 85 $M_{\odot}$ BH from GW 190521 appeared to challenge the upper-mass limit imposed by pair-instability (PI). Using systematic MESA…
Rotational superradiance generates the amplification of incoming waves of sufficiently low frequency when scattered with a rotating absorbing body. This may be used to discover new \emph{bosonic} particles of mass $m_b$ if the rotating body…
Gravitational-wave detections have revealed a previously unknown population of stellar mass black holes with masses above $20\, M_{\odot}$. These observations provide a new way to test models of stellar evolution for massive stars. By…
Using high-resolution simulations of black hole formation from the direct collapse of massive stars undergoing pulsational pair-instability supernovae (PPISN), we find a new phenomenon which significantly affects the explosion and leads to…
The correlation between black hole mass and the stellar mass of the bulge of the host galaxy has attracted much attention ever since its discovery. While traditional investigations of this correlation have treated elliptical galaxies as…
Dark matter sectors with hidden interactions have been of much interest in recent years. These frameworks include models of millicharged particles as well as dark sector bound states, whose constituents have electromagnetic gauge…