5–9 Jul 2026
University of Canterbury
Pacific/Auckland timezone

Black Holes Trapped by Ghosts

8 Jul 2026, 09:00
35m
Room E8 (Rātā / Engineering Core Building, University of Canterbury)

Room E8

Rātā / Engineering Core Building, University of Canterbury

Plenary Talk Plenary talks

Speaker

Bin Wang (Shanghai Jiao Tong University / Yangzhou University)

Description

Violent cosmic events, from black hole mergers to stellar collapses, often leave behind highly excited black hole remnants that inevitably relax to equilibrium. The relaxation is usually understood in linear perturbation theory and observed in gravitational wave. We disclose a distinct nonlinear regime exists before the linear ringdown. This intrinsic nonlinear regime is a long-lived bottleneck dominating the evolution. This stage is controlled by a saddle-node ghost in phase space, which traps the remnant and delays the onset of linearity by a timescale obeying a universal power-law. This new nonlinear dynamical behavior is a new target for future observations.

Research Area Gravitational Waves

Author

Bin Wang (Shanghai Jiao Tong University / Yangzhou University)

Presentation materials