General Relativity & Quantum Cosmology

Postulates are given for a quantum-gravitational description of black holes, that include correspondence with a quantum field theory description for freely falling observers crossing the horizon. These lead to “soft gravitational structure,” which can transfer information to outgoing radiation either with or without large metric perturbations. Prospects for observing such departures from the standard field-theoretic description of black holes will be briefly discussed.

: Astrophysical black hole candidates might be horizonless ultra-compact objects. Of particular interest is the plausible fundamental connection with quantum gravity. The puzzle is then why we shall expect Planck scale corrections around the horizon of a macroscopic black hole. Taking asymptotically free quadratic gravity as a possible candidate of UV completion of general relativity, I will show how the would-be horizon can be naturally replaced by a tiny interior as dictated by the dynamics. The new horizonless 2-2-hole, as a quite generic static solution sourced by sufficiently dense matter, may then be the nearly black endpoint of gravitational collapse. In the era of gravitational wave astronomy, echoes in the post-merger phase provide a great opportunity to probe such scenario. Given the uncertainties associated with the waveform of echoes, I will discuss some model-independent search strategies, where the primary task is to find the time delay between echoes. The search range is then motivated by the Planck scale deviation outside the would-be horizon.

The standard way to understand quantum corrected black holes leads to the information loss paradox and the lifetime dilemma. A radical way out of this situation is to give up a hypothesis which is tacitly assumed in the vast majority of works on the subject: that the classical singularity is substituted by something effectively acting as a sink for a long period of time, as seen by asymptotic observers. Eliminating this characteristic changes drastically much of the physics now associated to black holes. A nice feature of the new hypothesis it that it offers a clear possibility of experimental falsifiability with upcoming gravitational waves observations. In this talk I will discuss these possibilities.

The internal structure of extremal and near-extremal black holes in string theory involves a variety of ingredients — strings and branes — that lie beyond supergravity, yet it is often difficult to achieve quantitative control over these ingredients in a regime where the state being described approximates a black hole.  The supertube is a brane bound state that has been proposed as a paradigm for how string theory resolves black hole horizon structure.  This talk will describe how the worldsheet dynamics of strings can be solved exactly in a wide variety of supertube backgrounds, opening up the study of stringy effects in states near the black hole transition.

Black holes appear to lead to information loss, thus violating one of the fundamental tenets of Quantum Mechanics. Recent Information-Theory-based arguments imply that information loss can only be avoided if at the scale of the black hole horizon there exists a structure (commonly called fuzzball or

The black hole information paradox poses a serious difficulty for theoretical physics. Over the last two decades there has emerged a resolution to this paradox in string theory, based on the discovery that heavy states in string theory swell up into horizon sized "fuzzballs". The talk will review the fuzzball construction and how the traditional semiclassical expectation of a vacuum horizon gets violated. It has been recently argued that objects with a surface like a fuzzball should behave like a "firewall" for infalling objects; we show that this firewall argument is inconsistent because its assumptions violate causality.

The presence of a mass term for the scalar field allows for dramatic increases in the radiated gravitational wave signal and may stretch out the signal to last for years or even centuries. There are several potential smoking gun signatures of a departure from general relativity associated with this process. These signatures could show up within existing LIGO-Virgo searches.