Black holes, gravitational waves and fundamental physics: a roadmap

By L. Barack, V. Cardoso, S. Nissanke, T. Sotiriou, A. Askar, C. Belczynski, G. Bertone, E. Bon, D. Blas, R. Brito and 198 more. Classical and quantum gravity, 2018

748 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The grand challenges of contemporary fundamental physics—dark matter, dark energy, vacuum energy, inflation and early universe cosmology, singularities and the hierarchy problem—all involve gravity as a key component. And of all gravitational phenomena, black holes stand out in their elegant simplicity, while harbouring some of the most remarkable predictions of General Relativity: event horizons, singularities and ergoregions. The hitherto invisible landscape of the gravitational Universe is being unveiled before our eyes: the historical direct detection of gravitational waves by the LIGO-Virgo collaboration marks the dawn of a new era of scientific exploration. Gravitational-wave astronomy will allow us to test models of black hole formation, growth and evolution, as well as models of gravitational-wave generation and propagation. It will provide evidence for event horizons and ergoregions, test the theory of General Relativity itself, and may reveal the existence of new fundamental fields. The synthesis of these results has the potential to radically reshape our understanding of the cosmos and of the laws of Nature. The purpose of this work is to present a concise, yet comprehensive overview of the state of the art in the relevant fields of research, summarize important open problems, and lay out a roadmap for future progress. This write-up is an initiative taken within the framework of the European Action on ‘Black holes, Gravitational waves and Fundamental Physics’.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8ff2c9d291ff8ef5baea203c416d3a02b3158a9e

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Citations in the corpus

Primordial black holes confront LIGO/Virgo data: current situation (2020, background): “One of the most fundamental questions such observations raise is the nature of the BHs [3].”
Two populations of LIGO-Virgo black holes (2020, methodology): “environments. Other possible channels are also discussed in literature, e.g., mergers in AGN gas disks or mergers in triple systems assisted by the Kozai-Lidov mechanism. For a recent review see Ref. [91]. The majority of massive stars (>70%) are naturally born as binary systems. In the usual sce”
Stellar structure models in modified theories of gravity: Lessons and challenges (2019, background): “s been built in the concordance cosmological model [2], and has received further conﬁrmation from the recent detection of gravitational waves consistently interpreted as emitted out of binary mergers [3], and by the imaging of the shadow of the supermassive object at the center of the M87 galaxy ass”
Black holes with scalar hair in light of the Event Horizon Telescope (2020, background): “[102] for a recent review on future tests of fundamental physics from GWs and BHs.”
Spontaneous scalarisation of charged black holes: coupling dependence and dynamical features (2019, neutral): “the reviews [1, 2].”