Plasma, photons and black hole bombs

• Enrico Cannizzaro

Black Holes (BHs) are classical vacuum solutions of Einstein General Theory of Relativity. Despite their simplicity, BHs are probably the most fascinating predictions of GR and enjoy some extremely nontrivial properties. Electromagnetic waves scattering off a spinning BH can extract rotational energy from it via a phenomenon called Superradiance. Interestingly, these modes can be naturally confined by astrophysical plasma in the vicinity of the BH, making the extraction process continuous and causing an instability, the so-called black hole bomb. In this talk I will present the phenomenology of plasma-driven BH bombs and possible implications in astrophysics, gravity and high-energy physics.

Dicussion

Search for low-mass dark matter candidates with direct detection experiments

• Stefano Piacentini

At present, dark matter is only known via gravitational effects and its nature has not yet been discovered. The search for dark matter weakly interacting massive particles with noble liquids has probed masses down and below a GeV/c^2. Detecting the scattering of dark matter particles in the sub-GeV "low mass'' region is a challenging task, since, in this mass region, the typical energy transfer is below the experimental threshold. In the present seminar, after illustrating the state-of-the-art of the direct dark matter searches with noble liquids, I will present our phenomenological studies and an innovative analysis method to implement the detector response and background model in this kind of experiments.

Discussion