Speaker
Helvi Witek
(University of Illinois)
Description
Black holes are among the most intriguing predictions of general relativity, composed of the fabric of spacetime itself. Observations of black holes offer unique access to extreme gravity, and they enable us to address puzzles in fundamental physics ranging from dark matter to the very nature of gravity itself.
Among the compelling dark matter candidates are ultralight axion-like particles and dark photons. The latter are represented by Proca fields, and I will present new results of Proca hair around black holes. In the second half of the talk, I will present simulations of binary black holes surrounded by a scalar dark matter environment and the resulting gravitational wave signals.
