Highlights of 2019-20

With the first direct detections of gravitational waves (GWs) from the coalescence of compact binaries observed by the advanced LIGO and VIRGO interferometers, the era of GW astronomy has begun. Whilst there is strong evidence that the observed GWs are connected to the merger of two black holes (BH) or two neutron stars (NS), future detections may present a less consistent picture. Indeed, the possibility that the observed GW signal was created by a merger of exotic compact objects (ECOs) such as boson stars (BS) or axion stars (AS) has not yet been fully excluded. For a detailed understanding of the late stages of the coalescence full 3D numerical relativity simulations are essential. In this paper, we extend the infrastructure of the numerical relativity code BAM, to permit the simultaneous simulation of baryonic matter with bosonic scalar fields, thus enabling the study of BS–BS, BS–NS, and BS–BH mergers. We present a large number of single star evolutions to test the newly implemented routines, and to quantify the numerical challenges of such simulations, which we find to partially differ from the default NS case. We also compare head-on BS–BS simulations with independent numerical relativity codes, namely the SpEC and the GRChombo codes, and find good general agreement. Finally, we present what are, to the best of our knowledge, the first full NR simulations of BS–NS mergers, a first step towards identifying the hallmarks of BS–NS interactions in the strong gravity regime, as well as possible GW and electromagnetic observables.

We argue that near-future detections of gravitational waves from merging black hole binaries can test a long-standing proposal, originally due to Bekenstein and Mukhanov, that the areas of black hole horizons are quantized in integer multiples of the Planck area times an dimensionless constant . This condition quantizes the frequency of radiation that can be absorbed or emitted by a black hole. If this quantization applies to the 'ring down' gravitational radiation emitted immediately after a black hole merger, a single measurement consistent with the predictions of classical general relativity would rule out most or all (depending on the spin of the hole) of the extant proposals in the literature for the value of . A measurement of two such events for final black holes with substantially different spins would rule out the proposal for any . If the modification of general relativity is confined to the near-horizon region within the hole's light ring and does not affect the initial ring down signal, a detection of 'echoes' with characteristic properties could still confirm the proposal.

Gravitational area laws are expected to arise as a result of ignorance of 'UV gravitational data'. In AdS/CFT, the UV/IR correspondence suggests that this data is dual to infrared physics in the CFT. Motivated by these heuristic expectations, we define a precise framework for explaining bulk area laws (in any dimension) by discarding IR CFT data. In (1+1) boundary dimensions, our prescribed mechanism shows explicitly that the boundary dual to these area laws is strong subadditivity of von Neumann entropy. Moreover, such area laws may be of arbitrary (and mixed) signature; thus our framework gives the first entropic explanation of mixed signature area laws (as well as area laws for certain dynamical causal horizons). In general dimension, the framework is easily modified to include bulk quantum corrections, thus giving rise to an infinite family of bulk generalized second laws.

It has been shown recently that the strong cosmic censorship conjecture is violated by near-extremal Reissner–Nordström–de Sitter black holes. We investigate whether the introduction of a charged scalar field can rescue strong cosmic censorship. We find that such a field improves the situation but there is always a neighbourhood of extremality in which strong cosmic censorship is violated by perturbations arising from smooth initial data.

The stochastic approach aims at describing the long-wavelength part of quantum fields during inflation by a classical stochastic theory. It is usually formulated in terms of Langevin equations, giving rise to a Fokker–Planck equation for the probability distribution function of the fields, and possibly their momenta. The link between these two descriptions is ambiguous in general, as it depends on an implicit discretisation procedure, the two prominent ones being the Itô and Stratonovich prescriptions. Here we show that the requirement of general covariance under field redefinitions is verified only in the latter case, however at the expense of introducing spurious 'frame' dependences. This stochastic anomaly disappears when there is only one source of stochasticity, like in slow-roll single-field inflation, but manifests itself when taking into account the full phase space, or in the presence of multiple fields. Despite these difficulties, we use physical arguments to write down a covariant Fokker–Planck equation that describes the diffusion of light scalar fields in non-linear sigma models in the overdamped limit. We apply it to test scalar fields in de Sitter space and show that some statistical properties of a class of two-field models with derivative interactions can be reproduced by using a correspondence with a single-field model endowed with an effective potential. We also present explicit results in a simple extension of the single-field theory to a hyperbolic field space geometry. The difficulties we describe seem to be the stochastic counterparts of the notoriously difficult problem of maintaining general covariance in quantum theories, and the related choices of operator ordering and path-integral constructions. Our work thus opens new avenues of research at the crossroad between cosmology, statistical physics, and quantum field theory.

The grand challenges of contemporary fundamental physics—dark matter, dark energy, vacuum energy, inflation and early universe cosmology, singularities and the hierarchy problem—all involve gravity as a key component. And of all gravitational phenomena, black holes stand out in their elegant simplicity, while harbouring some of the most remarkable predictions of General Relativity: event horizons, singularities and ergoregions.

The hitherto invisible landscape of the gravitational Universe is being unveiled before our eyes: the historical direct detection of gravitational waves by the LIGO-Virgo collaboration marks the dawn of a new era of scientific exploration. Gravitational-wave astronomy will allow us to test models of black hole formation, growth and evolution, as well as models of gravitational-wave generation and propagation. It will provide evidence for event horizons and ergoregions, test the theory of General Relativity itself, and may reveal the existence of new fundamental fields. The synthesis of these results has the potential to radically reshape our understanding of the cosmos and of the laws of Nature.

The purpose of this work is to present a concise, yet comprehensive overview of the state of the art in the relevant fields of research, summarize important open problems, and lay out a roadmap for future progress. This write-up is an initiative taken within the framework of the European Action on 'Black holes, Gravitational waves and Fundamental Physics'.

We perform a reduced phase space quantization of gravity using four Klein–Gordon scalar fields as reference matter as an alternative to the Brown–Kuchar dust model in Giesel and Thiemann (2010 Class. Quantum Grav. 27 175009), where dust scalar fields are used. We compare our results to an earlier model by Domagala et al (2010 Phys. Rev. D 82 104038) where only one Klein–Gordon scalar field is considered as reference matter for the Hamiltonian constraint but the spatial diffeomorphism constraints are quantized using Dirac quantization. As a result we find that the choice of four conventional Klein–Gordon scalar fields as reference matter leads to a reduced dynamical model that cannot be quantized using loop quantum gravity techniques. However, we further discuss a slight generalization of the action for the four Klein–Gordon scalar fields and show that this leads to a model which can be quantized in the framework of loop quantum gravity. By comparison of the physical Hamiltonian operators obtained from the model by Domagala et al (2010 Phys. Rev. D 82 104038) and the one introduced in this work we are able to make a first step towards comparing Dirac and reduced phase space quantization in the context of the spatial diffeomorphism constraints.

KAGRA is a second-generation interferometric gravitational-wave detector with 3 km arms constructed at Kamioka, Gifu, Japan. It is now in its final installation phase, which we call bKAGRA (baseline KAGRA), with scientific observations expected to begin in late 2019. One of the advantages of KAGRA is its underground location of at least 200 m below the ground surface, which reduces seismic motion at low frequencies and increases the stability of the detector. Another advantage is that it cools down the sapphire test mass mirrors to cryogenic temperatures to reduce thermal noise. In April–May 2018, we operated a 3 km Michelson interferometer with a cryogenic test mass for 10 d, which was the first time that km-scale interferometer was operated at cryogenic temperatures. In this article, we report the results of this 'bKAGRA Phase 1' operation. We have demonstrated the feasibility of 3 km interferometer alignment and control with cryogenic mirrors.

The weak equivalence principle (WEP), stating that two bodies of different compositions and/or mass fall at the same rate in a gravitational field (universality of free fall), is at the very foundation of general relativity. The MICROSCOPE mission aims to test its validity to a precision of 10⁻¹⁵, two orders of magnitude better than current on-ground tests, by using two masses of different compositions (titanium and platinum alloys) on a quasi-circular trajectory around the Earth. This is realised by measuring the accelerations inferred from the forces required to maintain the two masses exactly in the same orbit. Any significant difference between the measured accelerations, occurring at a defined frequency, would correspond to the detection of a violation of the WEP, or to the discovery of a tiny new type of force added to gravity. MICROSCOPE's first results show no hint for such a difference, expressed in terms of Eötvös parameter (both 1 uncertainties) for a titanium and platinum pair of materials. This result was obtained on a session with 120 orbital revolutions representing 7% of the current available data acquired during the whole mission. The quadratic combination of 1 uncertainties leads to a current limit on of about .

The second generation of gravitational-wave (GW) detectors are being built and tuned all over the world. The detection of signals from binary black holes is beginning to fulfil the promise of GW astronomy. In this work, we examine several possible configurations for third-generation laser interferometers in existing km-scale facilities. We propose a set of astrophysically motivated metrics to evaluate detector performance. We measure the impact of detector design choices against these metrics, providing a quantitative cost-benefit analyses of the resulting scientific payoffs.

The LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo Collaboration have cataloged eleven confidently detected gravitational-wave events during the first two observing runs of the advanced detector era. All eleven events were consistent with being from well-modeled mergers between compact stellar-mass objects: black holes or neutron stars. The data around the time of each of these events have been made publicly available through the gravitational-wave open science center. The entirety of the gravitational-wave strain data from the first and second observing runs have also now been made publicly available. There is considerable interest among the broad scientific community in understanding the data and methods used in the analyses. In this paper, we provide an overview of the detector noise properties and the data analysis techniques used to detect gravitational-wave signals and infer the source properties. We describe some of the checks that are performed to validate the analyses and results from the observations of gravitational-wave events. We also address concerns that have been raised about various properties of LIGO–Virgo detector noise and the correctness of our analyses as applied to the resulting data.

The original singularity theorems of Penrose and Hawking were proved for matter obeying the null energy condition or strong energy condition, respectively. Various authors have proved versions of these results under weakened hypotheses, by considering the Riccati inequality obtained from Raychaudhuri's equation. Here, we give a different derivation that avoids the Raychaudhuri equation but instead makes use of index form methods. We show how our results improve over existing methods and how they can be applied to hypotheses inspired by quantum energy inequalities. In this last case, we make quantitative estimates of the initial conditions required for our singularity theorems to apply.