Black hole spectroscopy, nonlinear gravity, horizon imaging: a dark discovery era.

by Gregorio Carullo (Univ. Birmingham)

Wednesday 26 Mar 2025, 16:00 → 17:30 Europe/Rome

Aula Conversi (Dip. di Fisica . Edificio G. Marconi)

The study of black hole excitations and their subsequent relaxation, known as Black Hole Spectroscopy, is as fundamental to our understanding of the Universe as atomic spectroscopy has been in the last century.
In itself, this dark gravitational emission underlines the most powerful emission processes happening throughout the Universe: binary black hole mergers. Further, a precise spectroscopic characterisation of gravitational-wave signals offers a clean detector of new physics channels, such as dark matter, modifications to the gravitational action and Standard Model extensions. Still, despite the striking simplicity of black holes, and decades of developments in classical perturbation theory, many of their dynamical and nonlinear properties still remain unknown.
This knowledge gap lies at the heart of the biggest unsolved problem in gravitational-wave physics: the violent nonlinear merger regime of black hole coalescences. I will discuss recent breakthroughs in this direction and their impact to advance our understanding of gravity, searches for new physics, and to harvest the full potential of next-generation detectors in achieving high-precision measurements.