English

Causality Constraints on Black Holes beyond GR

High Energy Physics - Theory 2022-09-07 v2 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

We derive causality constraints on the simplest scalar-tensor theories in which black holes differ from what General Relativity predicts, a scalar coupled to the Gauss-Bonnet or the Chern-Simons terms. Demanding that time advances are unobservable within the regime of validity of these effective field theories, we find their cutoff must be parametrically of the same size as the inverse Schwarzschild radius of the black holes for which the non-standard effects are of order one. For astrophysical black holes within the range of current gravitational wave detectors, this means a cutoff length at the km. We further explore the leading additional higher-dimensional operators potentially associated with the scale of UV completion and discuss their phenomenological implications for gravitational wave science.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2205.08551,
  title  = {Causality Constraints on Black Holes beyond GR},
  author = {Francesco Serra and Javi Serra and Enrico Trincherini and Leonardo G. Trombetta},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.08551},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

28 pages, 1 figure; added references

R2 v1 2026-06-24T11:20:22.083Z