Searcharxiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2509.18313

Exploring Black Hole Environments

Thomas F. M. Spieksma
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

The past decade has transformed our ability to observe the Universe. Via gravitational waves, merging black holes and neutron stars can now be directly detected, offering unprecedented opportunities to test General Relativity and explore astrophysics in a new way. Driven by this breakthrough, the next generation of detectors is being developed to observe a wider range of sources with greater precision, ushering in a new era in gravitational-wave astronomy: leveraging black holes as probes of new physics. This thesis investigates how astrophysical environments, such as plasma, dark-matter structures, and clouds of ultralight bosons, affect black holes and their gravitational-wave signatures. After a short overview of gravitational-wave astrophysics, I study three classes of scenarios. (i) Isolated black holes: I examine boson clouds around black holes, their electromagnetic couplings and the role of surrounding plasma. (ii) Ringdown: I show that plasma can strongly modify the ringdown of charged black holes, whereas realistic dark-matter halos produce no detectable deviations even for next-generation detectors. (iii) Inspiral: for extreme-mass-ratio inspirals with boson clouds, I find that orbital resonances typically destroy the cloud unless the orbit is nearly counter-rotating, yielding new and exciting observational signatures. Entering the relativistic regime, I develop a self-consistent perturbative framework to model generic environments in extreme-mass-ratio binaries and apply it to the boson-cloud case. Finally, I construct a model for binaries repeatedly crossing active galactic-nucleus disks and track their long-term orbital evolution. The results of this thesis show how black hole environments shape gravitational-wave signals and open avenues for testing new physics with future observatories such as LISA or the Einstein Telescope.

Explore related subjects

gr-qcastro-ph.COastro-ph.HEhep-phhep-th

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Thomas F. M. Spieksma. 2025-09-22. Exploring Black Hole Environments. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.18313

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Electrovacuum Black Hole Uniqueness

We prove the black hole uniqueness conjecture in the axially symmetric, stationary, electrovacuum setting, subject to the refined asymptotic analysis of the associated singular harmonic maps, which includes an analyticity hypothesis at the axes. More precisely, it is shown that any asymptotically flat solution of the Einstein--Maxwell equations in this class, with more than one black hole horizon component is either: Majumdar--Papapetrou, up to a duality rotation, in which case all logarithmic angle defects vanish, or every finite axis rod logarithmic angle defect is strictly negative and hence every interaction force is strictly attractive. The proof extends the singular harmonic map method used for vacuum Kerr uniqueness in [18].

gr-qc↗
arXiv2026

Constraining Modified Mass-to-Horizon Cosmology Through Primordial Inflationary Observables

We investigate slow-roll inflation in a modified cosmological framework inspired by a generalized mass-to-horizon relation (MHR), $M=\gamma {c^2 L^n}/{G}$, where $n$ is a real parameter and $\gamma$ a dimensional constant. Using Padmanabhan's emergence paradigm, we derive the modified Friedmann equations for a flat FRW universe and analyze the dynamics of a canonical scalar field (inflaton) under the slow-roll approximation. We study the resulting inflationary phenomenology for power-law and Starobinsky potentials. For power-law potentials, the MHR modification fails to reconcile these models with current CMB constraints on $r$ and $n_s$. In contrast, Starobinsky inflation exhibits significant sensitivity to deviations from $n=1$. A perturbative analysis ($n=1+\Delta$) yields corrections to inflationary observables. We observe that the scalar power-spectrum normalization, under a fixed-Starobinsky prescription, imposes the stringent constraint $0.960 \lesssim n \lesssim 1.040$ for $N=60$ efolds. This is considerably tighter than spectral-index bounds. Our results establish inflation, particularly Starobinsky-like models, as a sensitive probe of generalized horizon thermodynamics and departures from standard MHR scaling.

gr-qc↗
arXiv2026

Improving the Sensitivity of Gravitational Wave Detection with Weighted Conformal Prediction

In the last decade, kilometre-scale interferometric gravitational-wave detectors have observed hundreds of compact binary mergers, the majority of which are binary black holes. However, the data are noise-dominated, and multiple independent search algorithms (pipelines) are used to enhance sensitivity and improve robustness. Rather than the standard approach of selecting the most significant pipeline output, we combine the outputs from all pipelines using a conformal prediction-based framework to provide statistically rigorous confidence estimates for candidate events. While combining pipelines improves sensitivity and ranking robustness, it requires a principled statistical framework that remains valid as data properties evolve across observing runs. A key challenge is distribution shifts between simulated datasets used for training and calibration and the real, unlabelled, observations used for testing, which can invalidate coverage guarantees and bias confidence estimates. In this work, we address this challenge by incorporating likelihood-ratio reweighting into our conformal prediction framework to account for covariate shift. Using mock datasets containing simulated signals, we demonstrate that weighted conformal prediction restores well-calibrated coverage under covariate shift and increases the confidence of events near the detection threshold, recovering true signals that would otherwise be missed.

gr-qc↗