We use a mathematical approach based on the constraints systems in order to reconstruct the equation of state and the inflationary potential for the inflaton field from the observed spectral indices for the density perturbations and the tensor to scalar ratio . From the astronomical data, we can observe that the measured values of these two indices lie on a two-dimensional surface. We express these indices in terms of the Hubble slow-roll parameters and we assume that . For the function , we consider three cases, where is constant, linear and quadratic, respectively. From this, we derive second-order equations whose solutions provide us with the explicit forms for the expansion scale-factor, the scalar-field potential, and the effective equation of state for the scalar field. Finally, we show that for there exist mappings which transform one cosmological solution to another and allow new solutions to be generated from existing ones.

Binary neutron star mergers observations are a unique way to constrain fundamental physics and astrophysics at the extreme. The interpretation of gravitational-wave events and their electromagnetic counterparts crucially relies on general-relativistic models of the merger remnants. Quantitative models can be obtained only by means of numerical relativity simulations in dimensions including detailed input physics for the nuclear matter, electromagnetic and weak interactions. This review summarizes the current understanding of merger remnants focusing on some of the aspects that are relevant for multimessenger observations.

Shortly after the discovery of the Kerr metric in 1963, it was realized that a region existed outside of the black hole's event horizon where no time-like observer could remain stationary. In 1969, Roger Penrose showed that particles within this ergosphere region could possess negative energy, as measured by an observer at infinity. When captured by the horizon, these negative energy particles essentially extract mass and angular momentum from the black hole. While the decay of a single particle within the ergosphere is not a particularly efficient means of energy extraction, the of multiple particles can reach arbitrarily high center-of-mass energy in the limit of extremal black hole spin. The resulting particles can escape with high efficiency, potentially erving as a probe of high-energy particle physics as well as general relativity. In this paper, we briefly review the history of the field and highlight a specific astrophysical application of the collisional Penrose process: the potential to enhance annihilation of dark matter particles in the vicinity of a supermassive black hole.

The science objectives of the LISA mission have been defined under the implicit assumption of a 4-years continuous data stream. Based on the performance of LISA Pathfinder, it is now expected that LISA will have a duty cycle of , which would reduce the effective span of usable data to 3 years. This paper reports the results of a study by the LISA Science Group, which was charged with assessing the additional science return of increasing the mission lifetime. We explore various observational scenarios to assess the impact of mission duration on the main science objectives of the mission. We find that the science investigations most affected by mission duration concern the search for seed black holes at cosmic dawn, as well as the study of stellar-origin black holes and of their formation channels via multi-band and multi-messenger observations. We conclude that an extension to 6 years of mission operations is recommended.

We investigate the properties of a special class of singular solutions for a self-gravitating perfect fluid in general relativity: the singular isothermal sphere. For arbitrary constant equation-of-state parameter , there exist static, spherically-symmetric solutions with density profile , with the constant of proportionality fixed to be a special function of . Like black holes, singular isothermal spheres possess a fixed mass-to-radius ratio independent of size, but no horizon cloaking the curvature singularity at . For , these solutions can be constructed from a homogeneous dilaton background, where the metric spontaneously breaks spatial homogeneity. We study the perturbative structure of these solutions, finding the radial modes and tidal Love numbers, and also find interesting properties in the geodesic structure of this geometry. Finally, connections are discussed between these geometries and dark matter profiles, the double copy, and holographic entropy, as well as how the swampland distance conjecture can obscure the naked singularity.

We briefly overview the case for using black holes as a discriminator for theories of gravity. The opportunities and challenges for the various observational experiments are outlined, and key questions for the community identified. This note summarises the discussion from the roundtable on the third day of .

In this paper I investigate the possibility to test Einstein's equations with observations of cosmological large scale structure. I first show that we have not tested the equations in observations concerning only the homogeneous and isotropic Universe. I then show with several examples how we can do better when considering the fluctuations of both, the energy momentum tensor and the metric. This is illustrated with galaxy number counts, intensity mapping and cosmic shear, three examples that are by no means exhaustive.

Detection of a gravitational-wave signal of non-astrophysical origin would be a landmark discovery, potentially providing a significant clue to some of our most basic, big-picture scientific questions about the Universe. In this white paper, we survey the leading early-Universe mechanisms that may produce a detectable signal-including inflation, phase transitions, topological defects, as well as primordial black holes-and highlight the connections to fundamental physics. We review the complementarity with collider searches for new physics, and multimessenger probes of the large-scale structure of the Universe.

Impulsive gravitational waves in Minkowski space were introduced by Roger Penrose at the end of the 1960s, and have been widely studied over the decades. Here we focus on nonexpanding waves which later have been generalized to impulses traveling in all constant-curvature backgrounds, i.e., the (anti-)de Sitter universe. While Penrose's original construction was based on his vivid geometric "scissors-and-paste" approach in a flat background, until recently a comparably powerful visualization and understanding has been missing in the case with a cosmological constant . Here we review the original Penrose construction and its generalization to non-vanishing in a pedagogical way, as well as the recently established visualization: A special family of global null geodesics defines an appropriate comoving coordinate system that allows to relate the distributional to the continuous form of the metric.

Due to the growing capacity of gravitational-wave astronomy and black-hole imaging, we will soon be able to emphatically decide if astrophysical dark objects lurking in galactic centers are black holes. Sgr A*, one of the most prolific astronomical radio sources in our galaxy, is the focal point for tests of general relativity. Current mass and spin constraints predict that the central object of the Milky Way is supermassive and slowly rotating, thus can be conservatively modeled as a Schwarzschild black hole. Nevertheless, the well-established presence of accretion disks and astrophysical environments around supermassive compact objects can significantly deform their geometry and complicate their observational scientific yield. Here, we study extreme-mass-ratio binaries comprised of a minuscule secondary object inspiraling onto a supermassive Zipoy-Voorhees compact object; the simplest exact solution of general relativity that describes a static, spheroidal deformation of Schwarzschild spacetime. We examine geodesics of prolate and oblate deformations for generic orbits and reevaluate the non-integrability of Zipoy-Voorhees spacetime through the existence of resonant islands in the orbital phase space. By including radiation loss with post-Newtonian techniques, we evolve stellar-mass secondary objects around a supermassive Zipoy-Voorhees primary and find clear imprints of non-integrability in these systems. The peculiar structure of the primary, allows for, not only typical single crossings of transient resonant islands, that are well-known for non-Kerr objects, but also inspirals that transverse through several islands, in a brief period of time, that lead to multiple glitches in the gravitational-wave frequency evolution of the binary. The detectability of glitches with future spaceborne detectors can, therefore, narrow down the parameter space of exotic solutions that, otherwise, can cast identical shadows with black holes.

We refine and slightly enlarge the recently proposed first-order thermodynamics of scalar-tensor gravity to include gravitational scalar fields with timelike and past-directed gradients. The implications and subtleties arising in this situation are discussed and an exact cosmological solution of scalar-tensor theory in first-order thermodynamics is revisited in light of these results.

We analytically extend the 5D Myers-Perry metric through the event and Cauchy horizons by defining Eddington-Finkelstein-type coordinates. Then, we use the orthonormal frame formalism to formulate and perform separation of variables on the massive Dirac equation, and analyse the asymptotic behaviour at the horizons and at infinity of the solutions to the radial ordinary differential equation (ODE) thus obtained. Using the essential self-adjointness result of Finster-Röken and Stone's formula, we obtain an integral spectral representation of the Dirac propagator for spinors with low masses and suitably bounded frequency spectra in terms of resolvents of the Dirac Hamiltonian, which can in turn be expressed in terms of Green's functions of the radial ODE.

Hyperboloidal slices are spacelike slices that reach future null infinity. Their asymptotic behaviour is different from Cauchy slices, which are traditionally used in numerical relativity simulations. This work uses free evolution of the formally-singular conformally compactified Einstein equations in spherical symmetry. One way to construct gauge conditions suitable for this approach relies on building the gauge source functions from a time-independent background spacetime metric. This background reference metric is set using the height function approach to provide the correct asymptotics of hyperboloidal slices of Minkowski spacetime. The present objective is to study the effect of different choices of height function on hyperboloidal evolutions via the reference metrics used in the gauge conditions. A total of 10 reference metrics for Minkowski are explored, identifying some of their desired features. They include 3 hyperboloidal layer constructions, evolved with the non-linear Einstein equations for the first time. Focus is put on long-term numerical stability of the evolutions, including small initial gauge perturbations. The results will be relevant for future (puncture-type) hyperboloidal evolutions, 3D simulations and the development of coinciding Cauchy and hyperboloidal data, among other applications.

We compute the renormalized expectation value of the stress-energy tensor operator for a quantum scalar field propagating on three-dimensional global anti-de Sitter space-time. The scalar field has general mass and nonminimal coupling to the Ricci scalar curvature, and is subject to Dirichlet, Neumann or Robin boundary conditions at the space-time boundary. We consider both vacuum and thermal states, and explore whether the weak and null energy conditions are satisfied by the quantum stress-energy tensor. We uncover a rather complicated picture: compliance with these two energy conditions depends strongly on the mass and coupling of the scalar field to the curvature, and the boundary conditions applied.

Hawking's area theorem is a fundamental result in black hole theory that is universally associated with the null energy condition. That this condition can be weakened is illustrated by the formulation of a strengthened version of the theorem based on an energy condition that allows for violations of the null energy condition. With the semi-classical context in mind, some brief remarks pertaining to the suitability of the area theorem and its energy condition are made.

We put forward an attempt towards building a possible theoretical model to understand the observer dependent thermalization of black hole horizon. The near horizon Hamiltonian for a massless, chargeless particle is type. This is unstable in nature and so the horizon can induce instability in a system. The particle in turn finds the horizon thermal when it interacts with it. We explicitly show this in the Schrodinger as well as in Heisenberg pictures by taking into account the time evolution of the system under this Hamiltonian. Hence we postulate that existing instability near the horizon can be one of the potential candidates for explaining the black hole thermalization.

The Amaldi 10 Parallel Session C2 on gravitational wave (GW) search results, data analysis and parameter estimation included three lively sessions of lectures by 13 presenters, and 34 posters. The talks and posters covered a huge range of material, including results and analysis techniques for ground-based GW detectors, targeting anticipated signals from different astrophysical sources: compact binary inspiral, merger and ringdown; GW bursts from intermediate mass binary black hole mergers, cosmic string cusps, core-collapse supernovae, and other unmodeled sources; continuous waves from spinning neutron stars; and a stochastic GW background. There was considerable emphasis on Bayesian techniques for estimating the parameters of coalescing compact binary systems from the gravitational waveforms extracted from the data from the advanced detector network. This included methods to distinguish deviations of the signals from what is expected in the context of General Relativity.

We describe an attempt of string theoretic derivation of the Gibbons-Hawking entropy. Despite not admitting a de Sitter vacuum, the string theory, by the power of open-close correspondence, captures the Gibbons-Hawking entropy as the entropy of Chan-Paton species on a de Sitter-like state obtained via -branes. Moreover, this derivation sheds a new light at the origin of the area-form, since the equality takes place for a critical 't Hooft coupling for which the species entropy of open strings saturates the area-law unitarity bound.