March 30, 2021 to April 1, 2021
Institut Henri Poincaré
Europe/Paris timezone

Detecting scalar field with extreme mass ratio inspirals

Apr 1, 2021, 2:45 PM
15m
TESTS DE LA RELATIVITÉ GÉNÉRALE ET THÉORIES ALTERNATIVES Contributed talks: Tests of GR and alternative theories

Speaker

Nicola Franchini (Sissa)

Description

I will present extreme mass ratio inspirals (EMRIs), during which a small body spirals into a supermassive black hole, in gravity theories with additional scalar fields. No-hair theorems and properties of known theories that manage to circumvent them introduce a drastic simplification to the problem: the effects of the scalar on supermassive black holes, if any, are mostly negligible for EMRIs in vast classes of theories. I will show how to exploit this simplification to model the inspiral perturbatively and demonstrate that the scalar charge of the small body leaves a significant imprint on gravitational wave emission. This result is particularly appealing, as this imprint is observable with LISA, rendering EMRIs promising probes of scalar fields.

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