Photons propagating in a plasma acquire an effective mass $μ$, which is given by the plasma frequency and which scales with the square root of the plasma density. As noted previously by Conlon and Herdeiro, for electron number densities $n_e\sim 10^{-3}$ cm$^{-3}$ (such as those measured in the interstellar medium) the effective mass induced by the plasma is $μ\sim 10^{-12}$ eV. This would cause superradiant instabilities for spinning black holes of a few tens of solar masses. An obvious problem with this picture is that densities in the vicinity of black holes are much higher than in the interstellar medium because of accretion. We have conducted numerical simulations of the superradiant instability in spinning black holes surrounded by a plasma with density increasing closer to the black hole, in order to mimic the effect of accretion. While we confirm that superradiant instabilities appear for plasma densities that are sufficiently low near the black hole, we find that astrophysically realistic accretion disks are unlikely to trigger such instabilities.
We study the superradiant instability in scalar-tensor theories of gravitation, where matter outside a black hole provides an effective mass to the scalar degree of freedom of the gravitational sector. We discuss this effect for arbitrarily spinning black holes and for realistic models of truncated thin and thick accretion disks (where the perturbation equations are nonseparable), paying particular attention to the role of hot coronal flows in the vicinity of the black hole. The system qualitatively resembles the phenomenology of plasma-driven superradiant instabilities in General Relativity. …
In classical general relativity astrophysical black holes can be affected by the superradiant instability when gravity is minimally coupled to a light bosonic field. The majority of phenomenological studies have focused on the idealized case in which the black hole is initially surrounded by a single mode superradiant seed. By studying the evolution of a scalar field with multiple modes initial data in a quasiadiabatic approximation, we show that the dynamics is more involved and depend on the initial seed energy and the amplitude ratio between the modes. We also present preliminary results of…
We use the continued fraction method to determine the eigenfrequencies associated with a scalar field around a Kerr-like black hole. The Kerr-like metric considered in this article is a subclass of the general parametrization of axisymmetric black holes proposed by Konoplya, Rezzolla and Zhidenko. In addition to its mass $M$ and specific angular momentum $a$, the black hole depends on a third parameter $η$, called the deformation parameter. We investigate how the deformation parameter affects the quasinormal modes and the quasibound states of a massive scalar field around the black hole. In pa…
The hydrodynamic vortex, an effective spacetime geometry for propagating sound waves, is studied analytically. In contrast with the familiar Kerr black-hole spacetime, the hydrodynamic vortex model is described by an effective acoustic geometry which has no horizons. However, this acoustic spacetime possesses an ergoregion, a property which it shares with the rotating Kerr spacetime. It has recently been shown numerically that this physical system is linearly unstable due to the superradiant scattering of sound waves in the ergoregion of the effective spacetime. In the present study we use ana…
Direct detection of gravitational waves from several compact binary coalescences has ushered in a new era of astronomy. It has opened up the possibility of detecting ultralight bosons, predicted by extensions of the Standard Model, from their gravitational signatures. This is of particular interest as some of these hypothetical particles could be components of dark matter that are expected to interact very weakly with Standard Model particles, if at all, but they would gravitate as usual. Ultralight bosons can trigger superradiant instabilities of rotating black holes and form bosonic clouds t…
It was first pointed out by Press and Teukolsky that a system composed of a spinning Kerr black hole surrounded by a reflecting mirror may develop instabilities. The physical mechanism responsible for the development of these exponentially growing instabilities is the superradiant amplification of bosonic fields confined between the black hole and the mirror. A remarkable feature of this composed black-hole-mirror-field system is the existence of a critical mirror radius, $r^{\text{stat}}_{\text{m}}$, which supports {\it stationary} (marginally-stable) field configurations. This critical (`sta…
Superradiant instabilities of spinning black holes can be used to impose strong constraints on ultralight bosons, thus turning black holes into effective particle detectors. However, very little is known about the development of the instability and whether its nonlinear time evolution accords to the linear intuition. For the first time, we attack this problem by studying the impact of gravitational-wave emission and gas accretion on the evolution of the instability. Our quasi-adiabatic, fully-relativistic analysis shows that: (i) gravitational-wave emission does not have a significant effect o…
Motivated by electromagnetic-field confinement due to plasma near accreting black holes, we continue our exploration of the linear dynamics of an electromagnetic field propagating in curved spacetime in the presence of plasma by including three effects that were neglected in our previous analysis: collisions in the plasma, thermal corrections, and the angular momentum of the background black-hole spacetime. We show that: (i) the plasma-driven long-lived modes survive in a collisional plasma except when the collision timescale is unrealistically small; (ii) thermal effects, which might be relev…
The nature of dark matter is one of the longest-standing puzzles in science. Axions or axion-like particles are a key possibility, and arise in mechanisms to solve the strong CP problem but also in low-energy limits of string theory. Extensive experimental and observational efforts are actively looking for `axionic' imprints. Independently on their nature, their abundance, and on their contribution to the dark matter problem, axions form dense clouds around spinning black holes, grown by superradiant mechanisms. It was recently suggested that once couplings to photons are considered, an expone…
Frequency domain studies have recently demonstrated that charged scalar fields exhibit fast growing superradiant instabilities when interacting with charged black holes in a cavity. Here, we present a time domain analysis of the long time evolution of test charged scalar field configurations on the Reissner-Nordström background, with or without a mirror-like boundary condition. Initial data is taken to be either a Gaussian wave packet or a regularised (near the horizon) quasi-bound state. Then, Fourier transforming the data obtained in the evolution confirms the results obtained in the frequen…
Superradiant instabilities can trigger the formation of bosonic clouds around rotating black holes. If the bosonic field growth is sufficiently fast, these clouds could form shortly after a binary black hole merger. Such clouds are continuous sources of gravitational waves whose detection (or lack thereof) can probe the existence of ultralight bosons (such as axion-like particles) and their properties. Motivated by the binary black hole mergers seen by Advanced LIGO so far, we investigate in detail the parameter space that can be probed with continuous gravitational wave signals from ultraligh…
These notes were prepared for a lecture on black holes delivered at the DPG Physics School "General Relativity @ 99" (Physikzentrum Bad Honnef, Germany, September 2014). The common thread of the lecture is the relation between geodesic stability and black-hole perturbations in the geometric optics limit. Chapter 1 establishes notation and discusses a common misconception on Michell's "Newtonian black holes". Chapters 2 and 3 deal with particle dynamics and wave dynamics in black-hole spacetimes, respectively. All calculations should be simple enough that they can be done with pen and paper. Ch…
We study the superradiance effect in a class of scalar-tensor Horndeski theory. We first study the dynamics of a massive charged scalar wave scattered off the horizon of a Reissner-Nordström black hole which except its canonical coupling to gravity it is also coupled kinetically to curvature. We find that a trapping potential is formed outside the horizon of a Reissner-Nordström black hole, due to this coupling, and as the strength of the new coupling is increased, the scattered wave is superradiantly amplified, resulting to the instability of the Reissner-Nordström spacetime. We then consider…
It has been recently observed that a scalar field with Robin boundary conditions (RBCs) can trigger both a superradiant and a bulk instability for a BTZ black hole (BH). To understand the generality and scrutinize the origin of this behavior, we consider here the superradiant instability of a Kerr BH confined either in a mirror-like cavity or in AdS space, triggered also by a scalar field with RBCs. These boundary conditions are the most general ones that ensure the cavity/AdS space is an isolated system, and include, as a particular case, the commonly considered Dirichlet boundary conditions …
Exotic compact objects, horizonless spacetimes with reflective properties, have intriguingly been suggested by some quantum-gravity models as alternatives to classical black-hole spacetimes. A remarkable feature of spinning horizonless compact objects with reflective boundary conditions is the existence of a {\it discrete} set of critical surface radii, $\{r_{\text{c}}({\bar a};n)\}^{n=\infty}_{n=1}$, which can support spatially regular static ({\it marginally-stable}) scalar field configurations (here ${\bar a}\equiv J/M^2$ is the dimensionless angular momentum of the exotic compact object). …
Confined scalar fields, either by a mass term or by a mirror-like boundary condition, have unstable modes in the background of a Kerr black hole. Assuming a time dependence as $e^{-iωt}$, the growth time-scale of these unstable modes is set by the inverse of the (positive) imaginary part of the frequency, Im$(ω)$, which reaches a maximum value of the order of Im$(ω)M\sim 10^{-5}$, attained for a mirror-like boundary condition, where $M$ is the black hole mass. In this paper we study the minimally coupled Klein-Gordon equation for a charged scalar field in the background of a Reissner-Nordström…
Bosonic fields on rotating black hole spacetimes are subject to amplification by superradiance, which induces exponentially-growing instabilities (the `black hole bomb') in two scenarios: if the black hole is enclosed by a mirror, or if the bosonic field has rest mass. Here we present a time-domain study of the scalar field on Kerr spacetime which probes ultra-long timescales up to $t \lesssim 5 \times 10^6 M$, to reveal the growth of the instability. We describe an highly-efficient method for evolving the field, based on a spectral decomposition into a coupled set of 1+1D equations, and an ab…
Scalar and gravitational perturbations on Kerr-anti-de Sitter (Kerr-AdS) black holes have been addressed in the literature and have been shown to exhibit a rich phenomenology. In this paper we complete the analysis of bosonic fields on this background by studying Maxwell perturbations, focusing on superradiant instabilities and vector clouds. For this purpose, we solve the Teukolsky equations numerically, imposing the boundary conditions we have proposed in\cite{Wang:2015goa} for the radial Teukolsky equation. As found therein, two Robin boundary conditions can be imposed for Maxwell fields on…
A wave impinging on a Kerr black hole can be amplified as it scatters off the hole if certain conditions are satisfied giving rise to superradiant scattering. By placing a mirror around the black hole one can make the system unstable. This is the black hole bomb of Press and Teukolsky. We investigate in detail this process and compute the growing timescales and oscillation frequencies as a function of the mirror's location. It is found that in order for the system black hole plus mirror to become unstable there is a minimum distance at which the mirror must be located. We also give an explicit…
We investigate the superradiant instability for a charged scalar field in a $D$-dimensional small Reissner-Nordström-Anti-de Sitter (RN-AdS) black hole. Firstly, we solve the charged Klein-Gordon equation analytically by a matching method. We show that the general $D$-dimensional quasinormal frequencies depend on the relation between the angular momentum quantum number, $\ell$, and $D$. When $\ell$ is a (non-negative) integer multiple of $D-3$, i.e $\ell=p(D-3)$, we find an analytical quasinormal frequency formula adding a purely imaginary correction to the AdS normal frequencies. This is the …
We study gravitational perturbations of the Kerr-AdS_5 x S^5 spacetime with equal angular momenta. In this spacetime, we found the two kinds of classical instabilities, superradiant and Gregory-Laflamme instabilities. The superradiant instability is caused by the wave amplification via superradiance, and by wave reflection due to the potential barrier of the AdS spacetime. The Gregory-Laflamme instability appears in Kaluza-Klein modes of the internal space S^5 and breaks the symmetry SO(6). Taken into account these instabilities, the phase structure of Kerr-AdS_5 x S^5 spacetime is revealed. T…
Rotating axisymmetric objects amplify incoming waves by superradiant scattering. When enclosed in a cavity, the repeated interaction of a confined field with the object may trigger superradiant instabilities. Rotating binaries are ubiquitous in physics, and play a fundamental role in astrophysics and in everyday life instruments. Such binaries may be prone to superradiant phenomena as well, but their inherent complexity makes it challenging to study how exactly such instabilities can be triggered. Here, we study a binary of two absorbing objects (mimicking black hole binaries, blades of an hel…
Fundamental bosonic fields of arbitrary spin are predicted by generic extensions of the Standard Model and of General Relativity, and are well-motivated candidates to explain the dark components of the Universe. One of most promising channels to look for their presence is through their gravitational interaction with compact objects. Within this context, in this thesis I study several mechanisms by which bosonic fields may affect the dynamics and structure of black holes and neutron stars. The first part of the thesis is devoted to the study of massive spin-2 fields around spherically symmetric…
We theoretically investigate superradiance effects in quantum field theories in curved space-times by proposing an analogue model based on Bose--Einstein condensates subject to a synthetic vector potential. The breaking of the irrotationality constraint of superfluids allows to study superradiance in simple planar geometries and obtain intuitive insight in the amplified scattering processes at ergosurfaces. When boundary conditions are modified allowing for reflections, dynamical instabilities are found, similar to the ones of ergoregions in rotating space-times. Their stabilization by horizon…
The coupling between scalar and vector fields has a long and interesting history. Axions are one key possibility to solve the strong CP problem and axion-like particles could be one solution to the dark matter puzzle. Given the nature of the coupling, and the universality of free fall, nontrivial important effects are expected in regions where gravity is strong. Here, we show that i. A background EM field induces an axionic instability in flat space, for large enough electric fields. Conversely, a homogeneous harmonic axion field induces an instability in the Maxwell sector. When carried over …
Black branes and strings are generally unstable against a certain sector of gravitational perturbations. This is known as the Gregory-Laflamme instability. It has been recently argued that there exists another general instability affecting many rotating extended black objects. This instability is in a sense universal, in that it is triggered by any massless field, and not just gravitational perturbations. Here we investigate this novel mechanism in detail. For this instability to work, two ingredients are necessary: (i) an ergo-region, which gives rise to superradiant amplification of waves, a…
In this paper we analyze the propagation of a charged scalar field in a Reissner-Nordström black hole endowed with one anisotropic fluid that can play the role of a cosmological term for certain set of parameters. The evolution of a scalar wave scattering is examined giving rise to the same superradiant scattering condition as in the de Sitter case. In addition, an analysis of the modes coming from the application of quasinormal boundary conditions is presented. Some special cases displaying analytical solutions for the quasinormal frequencies are discussed. Moreover, the superradiant conditio…
Massive bosonic fields in the background of a Kerr black hole can either trigger superradiant instabilities (black-hole bombs) or form equilibrium configurations corresponding to pure bound states, known as stationary scalar clouds. Here, similar phenomena are shown to emerge in the fluctuation dynamics of a rotating photon-fluid model. In the presence of suitable vortex flows, the density fluctuations are governed by the massive Klein-Gordon equation on a (2+1) curved spacetime, possessing an ergoregion and an event horizon. We report on superradiant instabilities originating from quasi-bound…
Black holes typically inhabit highly dynamical galactic environments and are frequently permeated by accretion media. The inevitable scattering of scalar, electromagnetic and gravitational waves off rotating and charged black holes provides a remarkable demonstration of the energy extraction and subsequent amplification of scattered waves under the expense of the compact object's rotational and electromagnetic energy; a phenomenon known as superradiance. Certain circumstances tremendously favor the energy extraction process in such extent that linear superradiant instabilities are triggered. W…
We study the linear stability of asymptotically anti-de Sitter black holes in general relativity in spacetime dimension $d\ge4$. Our approach is an adaptation of the general framework of Hollands and Wald, which gives a stability criterion in terms of the sign of the canonical energy, $\mathcal{E}$. The general framework was originally formulated for static or stationary and axisymmetric black holes in the asymptotically flat case, and the stability analysis for that case applies only to axisymmetric perturbations. However, in the asymptotically anti-de Sitter case, the stability analysis requ…
Superradiant scattering is a radiation enhancement process that takes place in many contexts, and which has recently found exciting applications in astro and particle physics. In the framework of curved spacetime physics, it has been associated with the classical Penrose process for particles. Superradiance is usually also associated with bosonic fields around geometries with ergoregions and horizons. These notions are in clear tension however: the Penrose process occurs for horizonless geometries, and particles are composed of fermions. Here, we resolve the tension in its different aspects, b…
Light bosonic degrees of freedom have become a serious candidate for dark matter. The evolution of these fields around curved spacetimes is poorly understood but is expected to display interesting effects. In particular, the interaction of light bosonic fields with supermassive black holes, key players in most galaxies, could provide colourful examples of superradiance and nonlinear bosenova-like collapse. In turn, the observation of spinning black holes is expected to impose stringent bounds on the mass of putative massive bosonic fields in our universe. Our purpose here is to present a compr…
The superradiant instability can lead to the generation of extremely dense axion clouds around rotating black holes. We show that, despite the long lifetime of the QCD axion with respect to spontaneous decay into photon pairs, stimulated decay becomes significant above a minimum axion density and leads to extremely bright lasers. The lasing threshold can be attained for axion masses $μ\gtrsim 10^{-8}\ \mathrm{eV}$, which implies superradiant instabilities around spinning primordial black holes with mass $\lesssim 0.01M_\odot$. Although the latter are expected to be non-rotating at formation, a…
In this thesis we study the phenomenon of superradiance and its implications to the stability of black-holes (BH) and perfect-fluid stars. Superradiance is a radiation enhancement process that involves rotating dissipative systems. In BH spacetimes, superradiance is due to dissipation at the event horizon, with interesting associated phenomena, namely floating orbits and BH-bombs. BH superradiance is a very interdisciplinary topic, and its study allows us to obtain important results in the area of particle physics. The scattering of a scalar field by a rotating BH leads to the formation of qua…
The superradiant instability of Kerr-AdS black holes is studied by numerically solving the full 3+1 dimensional Einstein equations. We find that the superradiant instability results in a two stage process with distinct initial and secondary instabilities. At the end of the secondary instability the geometry oscillates at several distinct fundamental frequencies -- a multi-oscillating black hole. The multi-oscillating black hole is remarkably close to a black resonator, albeit with a bit of gravitational hair. During the hairy black resonator epoch, the evolution of the horizon area is consiste…
The superradiant instability of rotating black holes with negative cosmological constant is studied by numerically solving the full 3+1-dimensional Einstein equations. We find evidence for an epoch dominated by a solution with a single helical Killing vector and a multi-stage process with distinct superradiant instabilities.
Magnetic fields surrounding spinning black holes can confine radiation and trigger superradiant instabilities. To investigate this effect, we perform the first fully-consistent linear analysis of the Ernst spacetime, an exact solution of the Einstein--Maxwell equations describing a black hole immersed in a uniform magnetic field $B$. In the limit in which the black-hole mass vanishes, the background reduces to the marginally stable Melvin spacetime. The presence of an event horizon introduces a small dissipative term, resulting in a set of long-lived -- or unstable -- modes. We provide a simpl…
We study two types of linear instabilities in Einstein-Born-Infeld-scalar field theory and show that small Born-Infeld (BI) black holes suffer from superradiant instability within a particular range of frequencies; the larger the BI coupling parameter, the slower the growth rate of the instability. It is predicted that a small BI black hole decays into a small hairy black hole that has a charged scalar condensate floating near the horizon. We numerically show that there is a phase transition between hairy and BI black holes. The metric solution shows the existence of a hairy black hole for $T<…
The wave equation $\square_{g_{M,a}}ψ=0$ on subextremal Kerr spacetimes $(\mathcal{M}_{M,a},g_{M,a})$, $0<|a|<M$, does not admit real mode solutions, as was established by Shlapentokh-Rothman. In this paper, we show that the absence of real modes does not persist under the addition of an arbitrary short-range non-negative potential $V$ to the wave equation or under changes of the metric $g_{M,a}$ in the far away region of $\mathcal{M}_{M,a}$ (retaining the causality of $T$ there). In particular, we first establish, for any $0<|a|<M$, the existence of real mode solutions $ψ$ to equation $\squar…
We investigate instabilities of $F(R)$-charged $AdS_{4}$ black holes by a massive charged scalar field in a linear perturbation regime. We study tachyonic instabilities as the near horizon scalar condensation in a model of $F(R)$ gravity with planar horizon and investigate properties of possible phase transitions. The results show that such transitions are sensitive to the first derivative of $F(R)$ with respect to $R$ in that the larger its value, the higher the critical temperature, thus resulting in a new generation of high-temperature superconductors. Also, for a certain range of parameter…
In this paper, a detailed analysis for superradiant stability of the system composed by a $D$-dimensional Reissner-Nordström-anti-de Sitter (RN-AdS) black hole and a reflecting mirror under charged scalar perturbations are presented in the linear regime. It is found that the stability of the system is heavily affected by the mirror radius as well as the mass of the scalar perturbation, AdS radius and the dimension of space-time. In a higher dimensional space-time, the degree of instability of the superradiant modes will be severely weakened. Nevertheless, the degree of instability can be magni…
Black holes possess trapping regions which lead to intriguing dynamical effects. By properly scattering test fields off a black hole, one can extract energy from it, leading to the growth of the amplitude of the test field in expense of the black hole's energy. Such a dynamical phenomenon is called superradiance. Here, we study charged-scalar-field instabilities of Reissner-Nordström black holes immersed in a $d-$dimensional de Sitter Universe. By performing a thorough frequency-domain analysis we compute the unstable quasinormal resonances and link their presence with a novel family of quasin…
We present an investigation of the electromagnetic instabilities which are trig gered when an ultra relativistic electron beam passes through a plasma. The linear growth rate is computed for every direction of propagation of the unstable modes, and temperatures are modelled using simple waterbag distribution functions. The ultra relativistic unstable spectrum is located around a very narrow band centered on a critical angle which value is given analytically. The growth rate of modes propagating in this direction decreases like k^(-1/3).
The presence of a massive scalar field near a Kerr black hole is known to produce instabilities associated with bound superradiant modes. In this paper we show that for massive fermions, rather than inducing an instability, the bound superradiant modes condense and form a Fermi sea which extends well outside the ergosphere. The shape of this Fermi sea in phase space and various other properties are analytically computed in the semiclassical WKB approximation. The low energy effective theory near the black hole is described by ripples in the Fermi surface. Expressions are derived for their disp…
Plasma toroidal metric singularities in helical devices and tokamaks, giving rise to magnetic surfaces inside the plasma devices are investigated in two cases. In the first we consider the case of a rotational plasma on an helical device with circular cross-section and dissipation. In this case singularities are shown to place a Ricci scalar curvature bound on the radius of the surface where the Ricci scalar is the contraction of the constant Riemannian curvature tensor of magnetic surfaces. An upper bound on the initial magnetic field in terms of the Ricci scalar is obtained. This last bound …
