Speaker
Description
Quantum mechanics provides the fundamental framework for describing nature, and gravitational waves from binary black holes should ultimately be understood within this framework. It is widely believed that classical gravitational waves correspond to coherent states, so any deviation would signal genuine quantum features of gravity.
In this talk, based on our recent work published in Phys. Rev. Lett. 136, 061404 (2026), we present a quantum-mechanical description of gravitational waves from binary black holes during the inspiral phase. We show that the coherent-state description reproduces classical gravitational waves at leading order, while nonlinear effects generate squeezed states of gravitons. These results demonstrate that binary black hole gravitational waves are well described by coherent states, while also providing a concrete target for probing the quantum nature of gravity in future observations.