Tides in the Darkness: the Love Numbers of Black Holes

by Valerio De Luca (University of Geneva)

Thursday 4 Dec 2025, 11:30 → 12:30 Europe/Rome

GGI - 1/-1-201 - Meeting Room GGI (GGI)

Tidal Love numbers describe the conservative response of compact objects to external tidal fields. Remarkably, within General Relativity, they are found to vanish exactly for black holes in vacuum under static perturbations. We begin by revisiting this vanishing property from a symmetry-based perspective. We then examine how this property extends to the nonlinear level, and how it is altered when black holes interact with external environments or within extensions of General Relativity. We also investigate the tidal response to dynamical perturbations and discuss the prospects for detecting these effects in future gravitational-wave observations. Finally, we highlight connections with analogue-gravity realisations based on supersonic acoustic flows.