Two decades ago, we understood that small, four-dimensional, rotating black holes are unstable by solving wave equations, and the superradiance instability and black hole bomb mechanism became popular. Since then, what did we learn from wave equations? In this talk, I will briefly explain the wave equation analysis and current applications for black holes.
We know of two ways in which a black hole can end. The first is by black hole evaporation via the emission of Hawking radiation. This is an extremely slow process by which a solar mass black hole expected to take on the order of $10^{67}$ years to evaporate. We dub the second method black hole dissolution and, in contrast, this is a fast process whose early stages are the gravitational wave...
The spacetime Penrose inequality (SPI) is a geometric inequality bounding the mass of an asymptotically flat black hole from below in terms of the area of its event horizon. It has been proved in the setting of time symmetric initial data (the Riemannian Penrose inequality). We outline a proof of the SPI for asymptotically flat 2(n+1)-dimensional initial data sets which are invariant under a...
A consistent theory of quantum gravity will require a fully quantum formulation of the classical equivalence principle. Such a formulation has been recently proposed in terms of the equality of the rest, inertial and gravitational mass operators, and for non-relativistic particles in a weak gravitational field. In this work, we propose a generalization to a fully relativistic formalism of the...
Quark stars — a gravitationally bound quark-gluon plasma — have been
hypothesized to be the last gravitationally stable state of matter preceding collapse into a black hole. Originally such stars were thought to necessarily contain a significant component of strange quarks, but recent work has shown that up-down quark matter can be more stable than ordinary nuclei at sufficiently large baryon...
