Institute for Advanced Study Informal Astrophysics Seminar - Location Changed

I will talk about several fundamental physical theories that can potentially be discovered with the help of GW observatories. I will start with reviewing the effect known as "Black Hole Superradiance". If a new light bosonic particle happens to exist, any rapidly rotating BH of appropriate mass forms a cloud of these particles around itself. These clouds affect the distribution of BH spins, can be a source of GW emission on their own. Given certain extensions of the model, they can also produce bursts of gamma rays thus providing electromagnetic counterparts for the GW events. In the second part of the talk, I will discuss UV extensions of general relativity. A very large class of theories of this sort can be described by addition of certain higher derivative terms to the Einstein-Hilbert action. These theories are perfectly consistent theoretically and, with a lucky choice of parameters, can produce measurable and calculable corrections to the waveforms.