Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - DarkGRA (Unveiling the dark universe with gravitational waves: Black holes and compact stars as laboratories for fundamental physics)

Teaser

The landmark detection of gravitational waves has opened a new era in physics, giving access to the hitherto unexplored strong-gravity regime, where spacetime curvature is extreme and the relevant speeds are close to the speed of light. In parallel to its countless...

Summary

The landmark detection of gravitational waves has opened a new era in physics, giving access to the hitherto unexplored strong-gravity regime, where spacetime curvature is extreme and the relevant speeds are close to the speed of light. In parallel to its countless astrophysical applications, this discovery can have also important implication for fundamental physics.

The aim of the DarkGRA* project - funded by the European Research Council (ERC-2017-StG 757480) - is to investigate novel phenomena related to strong gravitational sources such as black holes and neutron stars - that can be used to turn these objects into cosmic labs, where matter in extreme conditions, particle physics, and the very foundations of Einstein\'s theory of gravity can be put to the test.

We are exploring some outstanding, cross-cutting problems in fundamental physics: the nature of black holes and of spacetime singularities, the limits of classical gravity, the existence of extra light fields, and the effects of dark matter near compact objects.

Work performed

A list of the main achievement obtained so far includes:

- Development of an analytical template for gravitational-wave echoes
- New constraints on exotic compact objects using the stochastic background in gravitational waves
- Projected constraints on exotic compact objects using the future LISA mission
- Development of a new metric describing deformed objects in General Relativity, publcily available: https://www.darkgra.org/projects.html
- Novel spin-tidal post-Newtonian terms for binary-coalescence waveforms
- Developed a repository for echoes: https://www.darkgra.org/gw-echo-catalogue.html

Final results

We expect to:

- include the echo template in a search pipeline to be implemented in current and future searches.
- explore the phenomenology of deformed compact objects in General Relativity
- Develop new ringdown tests of black holes and other objects

Website & more info

More info: http://www.darkgra.org.