In this talk I will discuss a novel mechanism to grow supermassive black hole seeds in star-forming ETG progenitors at z >1. This envisages the migration and merging of stellar compact remnants, via gaseous dynamical friction, toward the central regions of such galaxies. I will show that this process can build up central BH masses of order 10^4 − 10^6 Msun in a timescale shorter than 10^8 yr,...
In current stellar evolutionary models, the occurrence of pair-instability supernovae plays a key role in shaping the resulting black hole (BH) mass population, preventing the formation of remnants between about $[60, \, 120] \rm M_\odot$.
We develop a simple approach to describe BHs beyond the pair-instability gap, by convolving the initial mass function and star formation rate with the...
We study the impact of mass accretion in the evolution of LIGO-like black hole binaries. Based on simulated catalogues of binary populations, we estimate that a fraction of the events will have a detectable imprint of Eddington-level accretion, when detected by LISA or by LISA and ground-based detectors (multiband). Accretion can also induce bias in the binary parameters, such as the masses...
The tidal deformability of compact objects by an external field has a detectable imprint in the gravitational waves emitted by a binary system, which is encoded in the so-called Tidal Love Numbers (TLNs). For a particular theory of gravity, the TLNs depend solely on the object's internal structure and, remarkably, they vanish for black holes in general relativity. This fact has gathered...
This will be an overview talk about the Bondi-Metzner-Sachs group, which is the symmetry group of asymptotically flat spacetimes. After having reviewed its main properties, I will discuss some applications such as the memory effect. Next, I will discuss the BMS algebra in other contexts such as higher dimensions and black hole horizons. The latter is conjectured to be key in solving the...
The parameterized post-Newtonian (PPN) formalism is an invaluable tool to assess the viability of gravity theories using a number of constant parameters. These parameters form a bridge between theory and experiment, as they have been measured in various solar system experiments and can be calculated for any given theory of gravity. The practical calculation, however, can become rather...
We are working to provide accurate modelling of the dynamics and gravitational-wave signatures of black hole inspirals in the intermediate-mass-ratio regime (IMIRIs) (1:100-1:1000). In doing so we hope to bridge the gap between the accurate modelling of extreme-mass-ratio inspirals achieved through black hole perturbation theory, and that of comparable-mass inspirals using numerical...
Characteristic formulations of General Relativity (GR) have advantages over more standard spacelike foliations in a number of situations. For instance, the Bondi-Sachs formalism is at the base of codes that aim to produce gravitational waveforms of high accuracy, exploiting the fact that null hypersurfaces reach future null infinity and hence avoid systematic errors of extrapolation...
Spontaneous scalarization is a very interesting mechanism endowing the compact object with nontrivial scalar field. This mechanism is designed to work only in the strong gravity regime while remaining the weak field regime practically unaltered. While scalarization was discussed mainly for neutrons stars in the last few decades, it was recently discovered that black holes in Gauss-Bonnet...
The direct detection of gravitational waves (GWs) by the LIGO and VIRGO interferometric detectors has begun a new era of GW astronomy, allowing us to study the strong regime of gravity through GW signals produced by coalescence of compact objects. In this talk, I will present our numerical studies on coalescence of binary Exotic Compact Objects (ECOs) performed by solving the Einstein...
In this talk I will show how to derive an effective Hamiltonian constraint for the Schwarzschild geometry starting from the full loop quantum gravity Hamiltonian constraint and computing its expectation value on coherent states sharply peaked around a spherically symmetric geometry. I then use this effective Hamiltonian to study the interior region of a Schwarzschild black hole, where a...
Black holes mimickers, e.g. neutron stars or boson stars, are compact objects with similar properties to black holes.
The gravitational wave signal emitted by a binary of such putative objects during the inspiral phase is difficult to
distinguish from the one emitted by a black hole binary. Nevertheless, significant differences might appear in the
post merger signal. Inspired by the known...
