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Black hole bombs and explosions: from astrophysics to particle physics

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Abstract

Black holes are the elementary particles of gravity, the final state of sufficiently massive stars and of energetic collisions. With a 40-year long history, black hole physics is a fully-blossomed field which promises to embrace several branches of theoretical physics. Here I review the main developments in highly dynamical black holes with an emphasis on high energy black hole collisions and probes of particle physics via superradiance. This write-up, rather than being a collection of well known results, is intended to highlight open issues and the most intriguing results.

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Notes

  1. It is sometimes not appreciated that a, say, \(l=m=1\) mode is a sum of modes with respect to some other coordinate frame, where the following (black hole) scatterer is sitting.

  2. Note that Kaluza–Klein compactifications in extra-dimensional frameworks are equivalent to effective masses [78, 79].

  3. This bound has an interesting story. Kip Thorne, and others after him, attribute the conjecture to Freeman Dyson; I learned recently that Freeman Dyson denies he ever made such conjecture [111], and instead attributes such notion to his 1962 paper [112]; in that work he shows that the power emitted by a binary approaches the upper limit (and mass-independent number)\(128c^5/5G\) as the velocity of the binary members \(v\rightarrow c\).

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Acknowledgments

This work is the result of direct interactions with many colleagues throughout the last years. For discussions, correspondence and collaboration I am specially indebted to Enrico Barausse, Emanuele Berti, Richard Brito, Óscar Dias, Sam Dolan, William East, Leonardo Gualtieri, Carlos Herdeiro, Luis Lehner, José Lemos, Madalena Lemos, Akihiro Ishibashi, Hideo Kodama, Hirotada Okawa, Miguel Marques, Paolo Pani, Frans Pretorius, Jorge Pullin, Thomas Sotiriou, Ana Sousa, Ulrich Sperhake, João Rosa, Helvi Witek, Shijun Yoshida, Hirotaka Yoshino, Nicolas Yunes and Miguel Zilhão. All the figures were designed by Ana Sousa. I also thank all the participants of the “Extra-Dimension Probe by Cosmophysics” workshop in KEK, the YITP-T-11-08 workshop on “Recent advances in numerical and analytical methods for black hole dynamics,” the Perimeter Institute workshop “Exploring AdS-CFT Dualities in Dynamical Settings,” the “Spanish Relativity Meeting 2012,” and the Helsinki DECI Minisymposium Workshop on State of the Art in Scientific and Parallel Computing. Finally, I acknowledge partial financial support provided under the European Union’s FP7 ERC Starting Grant “The dynamics of black holes: testing the limits of Einstein’s theory” grant agreement no. DyBHo–256667 and the NRHEP 295189 FP7-PEOPLE-2011-IRSES Grant. Research at Perimeter Institute is supported by the Government of Canada through Industry Canada and by the Province of Ontario through the Ministry of Economic Development and Innovation.

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  1. Vitor Cardoso

    Present address: Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Waterloo, ON , N2J 2W9, Canada

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Cardoso, V. Black hole bombs and explosions: from astrophysics to particle physics. Gen Relativ Gravit 45, 2079–2097 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10714-013-1584-z

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