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Astrophysical Black Holes as Cosmic Labs

By: Paolo Pani
From: Instituto Superior Técnico
At: Instituto de Investigação Interdisciplinar, A2-25
[2014-02-12] 11:00

In the last few years several interesting phenomena associated to the interaction between massive black holes and fundamental bosonic fields have been discovered. I present a selection of them, including superradiance instabilities of spin-0, spin-1 and spin-2 fields, floating orbits in extreme-mass ratio inspirals and black-hole spontaneous scalarization. The theoretical potential of these effects as almost-model-independent smoking guns for exotic particles and modified gravity, as well as their limitations in realistic astrophysical scenarios, are discussed.