arXiv subjects

Bernard Raffaelli

Publications and source records attributed to Bernard Raffaelli.

9 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Asymptotics and Universality in Black Holes: from the quasinormal Weyl's law to the binary merger waveform

Current state-of-the-art approaches to black hole (BH) dynamics, encompassing several effective approximation schemes, offer a remarkable control of the quantitative aspects of strong gravity. They also provide key insights into some qualitative aspects of the problem. In spite of this, there remain blind spots that hinder the understanding of the mechanisms underlying some observed phenomena, in particular concerning simplicity and universality in BH spacetimes. Adopting an 'asymptotic reasoning' approach, by filtering non-essential degrees of freedom, can potentially unveil universality patterns by identifying key underlying structural stability mechanisms. We first illustrate such an asymptotic approach by focusing on a BH quasinormal (QNM) Weyl's law, that accounts for the universal asymptotics of the QNM "counting function". This permits to identify light-trapping and the (local) redshift effect as the underlying mechanisms, also offering a bridge to the universal patterns found in BH QNM spectral instability. As a by-product, Weyl's law universality formally opens an observational access to spacetime (effective) dimensionality. More heuristically, we sketch a program recently put forward to apply such 'asymptotic reasoning' to address the observed simplicity and universality patterns in binary BH merger dynamics. This program is built as a hierarchy of asymptotic models, potentially making contact with integrability theory in gravity, namely through the background sector in a "wave-mean flow" approach to BH binary dynamics.

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arXiv2022

The overtone level spacing of a black hole quasinormal frequencies: a fingerprint of a local $SL(2,\mathbb{R})$ symmetry

The imaginary part of the quasinormal frequencies spectrum for a static and spherically symmetric black hole is analytically known to be equally spaced, both for the highly damped and the weakly damped families of quasinormal modes. Some interesting attempts have been made in the last twenty years to understand in simple ways this level spacing for the only case of highly damped quasinormal frequencies. Here, we show that the overtone level spacing, for both the highly damped and weakly damped families of quasinormal modes, can simply be understood as a fingerprint of a hidden local $SL(2,\mathbb{R})$ symmetry, near different regions of the black hole spacetime, i.e. the near-horizon and the near-photon sphere regions.

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arXiv2022

A Weyl's law for black holes

We discuss a Weyl's law for the quasi-normal modes of black holes that recovers the structural features of the standard Weyl's law for the eigenvalues of Laplacian-like operators in compact regions. Specifically, we propose that the asymptotics of the counting function $N(\omega)$ of quasi-normal modes of $(d+1)$-dimensional black holes follows a power-law $N(\omega)\sim \mathrm{Vol}_d^{\mathrm{eff}}\omega^d$, with $\mathrm{Vol}_d^{\mathrm{eff}}$ an effective $d$-volume determined by the light-trapping properties of the black hole geometry. Concretely, the factorisation $\mathrm{Vol}_d^{\mathrm{eff}} \sim \left(8\pi/\kappa\right) \cdot \mathrm{Vol}^{\mathrm{trapped}}_{d-1}$ makes apparent the two underlying structural ingredients, namely the (local) redshift effect controlled by the surface gravity $\kappa$ and the volume $\mathrm{Vol}^{\mathrm{trapped}}_{d-1}$ of the (phase space) trapped set. In particular, this proposal extends the Weyl's law proved by Dyatlov & Zworski for the counting of slowest decaying quasi-normal modes, to include overtones. As an application, these Weyl's laws could provide a probe into the effective spacetime dimensionality, upon the counting of sufficiently many quasi-normal modes in the ringdown signal of binary black hole mergers.

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arXiv2021

Hidden conformal symmetry on the black hole photon sphere

We consider a class of static and spherically symmetric black hole geometries endowed with a photon sphere. On the one hand, we show that close to the photon sphere, a massless scalar field theory exhibits a simple dynamical $SL(2,\mathbb{R})$ algebraic structure which allows to recover the discrete spectrum of the weakly damped quasinormal frequencies in the eikonal approximation, and the associated quasinormal modes from the algebra representations. On the other hand, we consider the non-radial motion of a free-falling test particle, in the equatorial plane, from spatial infinity to the black hole. In the ultrarelativistic limit, we show that the photon sphere acts as an effective Rindler horizon for the geodesic motion of the test particle in the $(t, r)$-plane, with an associated Unruh temperature $Tc = \hbarΛ_c/2πk_B$, where $Λ_c$ is the Lyapunov exponent that characterizes the unstable circular motions of massless particles on the photon sphere. The photon sphere then appears as a location where the thermal bound on chaos for quantum systems with a large number of degrees of freedom, in the form conjectured a few years ago by Maldacena et al., is saturated. The study developed in this paper could hopefully shed a new light on the gravity/CFT correspondence, particularly in asymptotically flat spacetimes, in which the photon sphere may also be considered as a holographic screen.

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arXiv2014

Strong gravitational lensing and black hole quasinormal modes: Towards a semiclassical unified description

We examine in a semiclassical framework the deflection function of strong gravitational lensing, for static and spherically symmetric black holes, endowed with a photon sphere. From a first-order WKB analysis near the maximum of the Regge-Wheeler potential, we extract the real phase shifts from the S-matrix elements and then we derive the associated semiclassical deflection function, characterized by a logarithmic divergent behavior. More precisely, using the complex angular momentum techniques, we show that the Regge poles and the associated greybody factor residues, for a massless scalar field theory, from which one can recover the black hole quasinormal complex frequencies as well as the fluctuations of the high energy absorption cross section, play naturally the role of critical parameters in the divergent behavior of the semiclassical deflection function. For very high frequencies, we finally recover the logarithmic part of the classical strong deflection limit, which clarifies analytically the fundamental link between quasinormal modes and strong gravitational lensing, suggested in recent works.

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arXiv2013

A scattering approach to some aspects of the Schwarzschild Black Hole

In this paper, we consider a massless field, with spin j, in interaction with a Schwarzschild black hole in four dimensions, focusing mainly our study on the s-wave scattering. First, using a Fourier analysis, we show that one can have a simple and natural description of the Physics near the event horizon without using any conformal field approaches. Then, within the same "scattering picture", we derive analytically the imaginary part of the highly damped quasinormal complex frequencies and, as a natural consequence of our analysis, we show that thermal effects and in particular Hawking radiation, can be understood through the scattering of an ingoing s-wave by the non null barrier of the Regge-Wheeler potential associated with the Schwarzschild black hole. Finally, with the help of the well-known expression of the highly damped quasinormal complex frequencies, we propose a heuristic extension of the "tripled Pauli statistics" suggested by Motl, some years ago.

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arXiv2011

Resonance and absorption spectra of the Schwarzschild black hole for massive scalar perturbations: a complex angular momentum analysis

We reexamine some aspects of scattering by a Schwarzschild black hole in the framework of complex angular momentum techniques. More precisely, we consider, for massive scalar perturbations, the high-energy behavior of the resonance spectrum and of the absorption cross section by emphasizing analytically the role of the mass. This is achieved (i) by deriving asymptotic expansions for the Regge poles of the $S$-matrix and then for the associated weakly damped quasinormal frequencies and (ii) by taking into account the analytic structure of the greybody factors which allows us to extract by resummation the physical information encoded in the absorption cross section.

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arXiv2011

Fine structure of high-energy absorption cross sections for black holes

The high-energy absorption cross section of the Schwarzschild black hole is well approximated, in the eikonal regime, by the sum of two terms: the geometrical cross section of the black hole photon sphere and the contribution of a sinc function involving the geometrical characteristics (orbital period and Lyapunov exponent) of the null unstable geodesics lying on this photon sphere. From a numerical analysis, we show that, beyond the eikonal description, this absorption cross section presents a simple fine structure. We then describe it analytically by using Regge pole techniques and interpret it in geometrical terms. We naturally extend our analysis to arbitrary static spherically symmetric black holes endowed with a photon sphere and we then apply our formalism to Schwarzschild-Tangherlini and Reissner-Nordström black holes. Finally, on the example of the Schwarzschild black hole, we show numerically that a complicated hyperfine structure lying beyond the fine structure can also be observed.

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arXiv2010

Unstable circular null geodesics of static spherically symmetric black holes, Regge poles and quasinormal frequencies

We consider a wide class of static spherically symmetric black holes of arbitrary dimension with a photon sphere (a hypersurface on which a massless particle can orbit the black hole on unstable circular null geodesics). This class includes various spacetimes of physical interest such as Schwarzschild, Schwarzschild-Tangherlini and Reissner-Nordström black holes, the canonical acoustic black hole or the Schwarzschild-de Sitter black hole. For this class of black holes, we provide general analytical expressions for the Regge poles of the $S$-matrix associated with a massless scalar field theory. This is achieved by using third-order WKB approximations to solve the associated radial wave equation. These results permit us to obtain analytically the nonlinear dispersion relation and the damping of the "surface waves" lying close to the photon sphere as well as, from Bohr-Sommerfeld-type resonance conditions, formulas beyond the leading order terms for the complex frequencies corresponding to the weakly damped quasinormal modes

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