General Relativity And Quantum Cosmology

We study the issue of length renormalization in the context of fully covariant gravity theories as well as non-relativistic ones such as Ho?ava-Lifshitz gravity. The difference of their symmetry groups implies a relation between the lengths of paths in spacetime in the two types of theory. Provided that certain asymptotic conditions hold, this relation allows us to transfer analytic criteria for the standard spacetime length to be finite to the Perelman length to be likewise finite, and therefore formulate conditions for geodesic incompleteness in partially covariant theories. We also discuss implications of this result for the issue of singularities in the context of such theories.

Here we present a novel classical model to describe the near-inner horizon geometry of a rotating, accreting black hole. The model assumes spacetime is homogeneous and is sourced by radial streams of a collisionless, null fluid, and it predicts that the standard Poisson-Israel mass inflation phenomenon will be interrupted by a Kasner-like collapse toward a spacelike singularity. Such a model is shown to be valid at the inner horizon of astrophysically realistic black holes through comparison to the conformally-separable model, which provides a natural connection of the Kerr metric to a self-similar, accreting spacetime. We then analyze the behavior of null geodesics in our model, connecting them to the Kerr metric in order to answer the practical question of what an infalling observer approaching the inner horizon might see.

We investigate the geometrical structure of Vaidya's spacetime in the case of a white hole with decreasing mass, stabilising to a black hole in finite or infinite time or evaporating completely. Our approach relies on a detailed analysis of the ordinary differential equation describing the incoming principal null geodesics, among which are the generators of the past horizon. We devote special attention to the case of a complete evaporation in infinite time and establish the existence of an asymptotic light-like singularity of the conformal curvature, touching both the past space-like singularity and future time-like infinity. This singularity is present independently of the decay rate of the mass. We derive an explicit formula that relates directly the strength of this null singularity to the asymptotic behaviour of the mass function.

We study the gravitational radiation emitted during the scattering of two spinless bodies in the post-Minkowskian Effective Field Theory approach. We derive the conserved stress-energy tensor linearly coupled to gravity and the classical probability amplitude of graviton emission at leading and next-to-leading order in the Newton's constant G . The amplitude can be expressed in compact form as one-dimensional integrals over a Feynman parameter involving Bessel functions. We use it to recover the leading-order radiated angular momentum expression. Upon expanding it in the relative velocity between the two bodies v , we compute the total four-momentum radiated into gravitational waves at leading-order in G and up to an order v 8 , finding agreement with what was recently computed using scattering amplitude methods. Our results also allow us to investigate the zero frequency limit of the emitted energy spectrum.

Considering electrically charged test particles, we continue our study of the exterior dynamics of a charged Weyl black hole which has been previously investigated regarding the motion of mass-less and (neutral) massive particles. In this paper, the deflecting trajectories of charged particles are designated as being gravitationally Rutherford-scattered and detailed discussions of angular and radial particle motions are presented.

We investigate how the production of gravitational waves (GWs) is affected by the GW velocity ( c T ) during preheating after inflation. For instance, we simulate the production of GWs after λ ? 4 chaotic inflation, and find that GW spectrum is enhanced for c T <1 , but distorted (suppressed at low frequency, but enhanced at high frequency) for c T >1 .

We introduce a systematic and direct procedure to generate hairy rotating black holes by deforming a spherically symmetric seed solution. We develop our analysis in the context of the gravitational decoupling approach, without resorting to the Newman-Janis algorithm. As examples of possible applications, we investigate how the Kerr black hole solution is modified by a surrounding fluid with conserved energy-momentum tensor. We find non-trivial extensions of the Kerr and Kerr-Newman black holes with primary hair. We prove that a rotating and charged black hole can have the same horizon as Kerr's, Schwarzschild's or Reissner-Nordström's, thus showing possible observational effects of matter around black holes.

Considering a Schwarzschild black hole surrounded by a fully ionized hydrogen plasma, we study the refractive effect and the pure gravitational effect of the plasma on the shadow. The effects are treated in a unified formalism but characterized by two different parameters. For semi-realistic values of parameters, we find their corrections to the shadow radius are both negligible, and the gravitational correction can overtake the refractive correction for active galactic nuclei of masses larger than 10 9 M ??. Since the refractive effect is induced by the electromagnetic interaction, this result is in sharp contrast to the textbook knowledge that the ratio of the gravitational force to the electromagnetic force is G m e m p / e 2 =4.4? 10 ??0 in a hydrogen atom. With unrealistically large values of parameters, we illustrate the two effects on the light trajectories and the intensity map.

In this work we study the problem of linear stability of gravitational perturbations in stationary and spherically symmetric wormholes. For this purpose, we employ the Newman-Penrose formalism which is well-suited for treating gravitational radiation in General Relativity, as well as the geometrical aspect of this theory. With this method we obtain a "master equation" that describes the behavior of gravitational perturbations that are of odd-parity in the Regge-Wheeler gauge. This equation is later applied to a specific class of Morris-Thorne wormholes and also to the metric of an asymptotically flat scalar field wormhole. The analysis of the equations that these space-times yield reveals that there are no unstable vibrational modes generated by the type of perturbations here studied.

We study gravitational wave (GW) emission in the strong-field regime by a hierarchical triple system composed of a binary system placed in the vicinity of a supermassive black hole (SMBH). The LIGO-Virgo collaboration recently reported evidence for coalescences with this dynamical origin. These systems are common in galactic centers and thus are a target for the space-based LISA mission as well as other advanced detectors. Doppler shifts, aberration, lensing and strong amplitude modulations are features present in the GW signal from these systems, built into our framework and with no need for phenomenological patches. We find that the binary can resonantly excite the quasinormal modes of the SMBH, as in the resonant excitation of two tuning forks with matching frequencies. The flux of energy crossing the SMBH horizon can be significant, when compared with that from standard extreme-mass-ratio inspirals. Therefore, these triple systems are an outstanding probe of strong-field physics and of the BH nature of compact objects.