Testing strong-field gravity with tidal Love numbers

By V. Cardoso, Edgardo Franzin, A. Maselli, Paolo Pani, G. Raposo. 2017

223 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The tidal Love numbers (TLNs) encode the deformability of a self-gravitating object immersed in a tidal environment and depend significantly both on the object's internal structure and on the dynamics of the gravitational field. An intriguing result in classical general relativity is the vanishing of the TLNs of black holes. We extend this result in three ways, aiming at testing the nature of compact objects: (i) we compute the TLNs of exotic compact objects, including different families of boson stars, gravastars, wormholes, and other toy models for quantum corrections at the horizon scale. In the black-hole limit, we find a universal logarithmic dependence of the TLNs on the location of the surface; (ii) we compute the TLNs of black holes beyond vacuum general relativity, including Einstein-Maxwell, Brans-Dicke and Chern-Simons gravity; (iii) We assess the ability of present and future gravitational-wave detectors to measure the TLNs of these objects, including the first analysis of TLNs with LISA. Both LIGO, ET and LISA can impose interesting constraints on boson stars, while LISA is able to probe even extremely compact objects. We argue that the TLNs provide a smoking gun of new physics at the horizon scale, and that future gravitational-wave measurements of the TLNs in a binary inspiral provide a novel way to test black holes and general relativity in the strong-field regime.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b769c612b573844c7398ac3941b01d3bec3a4300

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Citations in the corpus

Dynamical boson stars (2012, background): “Tidal deformability of BSs was also studied recently in the context of testing strong-field general relativity [81].”
Static response and Love numbers of Schwarzschild black holes (2020, background): “The question of how a black hole responds is far from academic, as these effects contribute to the form of gravitational wave emission, and hence are in principle measurable [23].”
Phenomenological aspects of black holes beyond general relativity (2018, background): “However, ultracompact configurations without horizons can be tidally deformed [170].”
Science case for the Einstein telescope (2019, background): “Unlike second generation detectors, ET will for instance be able to distinguish neutron stars from boson stars even for the most compact models of the latter [161].”
Gravitational waves from neutron star mergers and their relation to the nuclear equation of state (2019, background): “A few recent works have proposed preliminary studies about whether current and future observations can distinguish between inspirals and mergers of NSs and boson stars [538, 95, 539, 540, 97, 541] or gravastars [542, 331, 315].”