Séminaire

New model of the coherent magnetic halo of the Milky Way

Recent catalog of Faraday rotation measures (RM) of extragalactic sources together with the synchrotron polarization data from WMAP and Planck provide us with the wealth of information on the Galactic magnetic field (GMF). In this talk, we will present a new model of the regular GMF outside of the thin disk. The model is based on several phenomenological components of the GMF -- the spiral arms, the toroidal halo, the X-shaped field and the compressed field of the Local Bubble wall.

Confronting the Cosmological Principle: How secure are the foundations of the cosmos?

I will present our recent work using quasars and radio galaxies to confront the cosmological principle, the idea that sits at the heart of modern cosmological theories. Whilst the cosmological principle states that the universe is isotropic and homogeneous, our observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) reveal a pronounced dipole, interpreted as our kinematic departure from the local Hubble flow.

Multi-metric black holes and the Gregory-Laflamme instability

Multi-metric gravity is the umbrella term for a class of modified gravitational theories, motivated by a number of problems at the interface between gravity and particle physics, that extend general relativity (GR) via the inclusion of additional interacting massive spin-2 fields beyond the single massless graviton of GR. Nonlinearly, the extra interactions manifest as a framework where multiple metric tensors interact with one another on the same spacetime manifold (hence the name).

Wave optics lensing of gravitational waves in LISA-band triple systems

One of the major predictions of Einstein’s general relativity is gravitational lensing, the deflection or amplification of light by mass distributions. In my talk, I focus on gravitational wave lensing in wave optics (very long wavelength), as opposed to the standard geometric optics. I show how a supermassive black hole acts as a wave optics lens, for triple systems in in the regime of the LISA mission.

Love numbers beyond GR and non-linear scalar tidal deformation

In General Relativity (GR), including Einstein-Maxwell theory, it is remarkable that all asymptotically flat black hole (BH) solutions have vanishing Love numbers. Consequently, the Love numbers of BHs present an excellent opportunity to examine any deviations from GR. We will investigate tidal deformations concerning neutral BHs and extremal BHs in EFT of gravity. In four dimensions, the primary contribution to the tidal Love numbers of neutral BHs arises from six derivative operators, while the Love numbers of extremal BHs are subject to corrections from four derivative operators.

Positivity bounds on electromagnetic properties of media

I will talk about the constraints imposed on the electromagnetic response of general media by microcausality (commutators of local fields vanish outside the light cone) and positivity of the imaginary parts (the medium can only absorb energy from the external field). The effect of the medium is encoded in the electric and magnetic permeabilities ε(ω, k) and μ(ω, k). In the case of dielectrics, we obtain bounds on the low-energy values of the response, ε(0, 0) and μ(0, 0).

Recent results on black hole perturbation theory

We will discuss two aspects of black hole perturbation theory: symmetries of static perturbations around black holes which underpins the vanishing of the tidal Love numbers, and nonlinear quasi-normal modes during black hole ringdown. 

Nonlinear Quasi-Normal Modes: Uniform Approximation

Nonlinear effects in black hole perturbation theory may be important for describing a black hole ringdown, as suggested by recent works. The influence of these nonlinear effects on quasi-normal modes of black holes is still poorly understood. I will show that a generalization of WKB method, the so-called technique of uniform approximations, can be used to accurately compute 1) nonlinear amplitudes at large distances in terms of the linear ones, 2) linear (and nonlinear) quasi-normal mode frequencies, 3) the wavefunction for both linear and nonlinear modes.

The formation and evolution of dark matter microhalos

Dark matter in the Universe can be considered as a collisionless self-gravitating fluid obeying the Vlasov-Poisson equations. In the standard picture of cosmic structure formation, the first dark matter objects to form are expected to be microhalos of roughly Earth mass and solar system size. These halos can subsequently merge to form larger dark matter halos such as that of our Galaxy. In practice, resolving dark matter dynamics relies on a N-body approach, but with the advent of exaflopic computers it now becomes possible to solve directly Vlasov dynamics in six-dimensional phase-space.
Séminaire