Gravitational Lensing by Rotating Naked Singularities

We model massive compact objects in galactic nuclei as stationary, axially-symmetric naked singularities in the Einstein-massless scalar field theory and study the resulting gravitational lensing. In the weak deflection limit we study analytically the position of the two weak field images, the corresponding signed and absolute magnifications as well as the centroid up to post-Newtonian order. We show that there are a static post-Newtonian corrections to the signed magnification and their sum as well as to the critical curves, which are function of the scalar charge. The shift of the critical curves as a function of the lens angular momentum is found, and it is shown that they decrease slightingly for the weakly naked and vastly for the strongly naked singularities with the increase of the scalar charge. The point-like caustics drift away from the optical axis and do not depend on the scalar charge. In the strong deflection limit approximation we compute numerically the position of the relativistic images and their separability for weakly naked singularities. All of the lensing quantities are compared to particular cases as Schwarzschild and Kerr black holes as well as Janis--Newman--Winicour naked singularities.Comment: 35 pages, 30 figure

Kerr-Sen dilaton-axion black hole lensing in the strong deflection limit

In the present work we study numerically quasi-equatorial lensing by the charged, stationary, axially-symmetric Kerr-Sen dilaton-axion black hole in the strong deflection limit. In this approximation we compute the magnification and the positions of the relativistic images. The most outstanding effect is that the Kerr-Sen black hole caustics drift away from the optical axis and shift in clockwise direction with respect to the Kerr caustics. The intersections of the critical curves on the equatorial plane as a function of the black hole angular momentum are found, and it is shown that they decrease with the increase of the parameter $Q^{2}/M$. All of the lensing quantities are compared to particular cases as Schwarzschild, Kerr and Gibbons-Maeda black holes.Comment: 31 pages, 17 figures; V2 references added, some typos corrected, V3 references added, language corrections, V4 table added, minor technical correction

Testing disformal non-circular deformation of Kerr black holes with LISA

International audienceThere is strong observational evidence that almost every large galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its center. It is of fundamental importance to know whether such black holes are described by the standard Kerr solution in General Relativity (GR) or by another black hole solution. An interesting alternative is the so-called disformal Kerr black holes which exist within the framework of degenerate higher-order scalar-tensor (DHOST) theories of gravity. The departure from the standard Kerr black hole spacetime is parametrized by a parameter $D$, called $\textit{disformal parameter}$. In the present work, we discuss the capability of LISA to detect the disformal parameter. For this purpose, we study Extreme Mass Ratio Inspirals (EMRI's) around disformal Kerr black holes within the framework of the quadrupole hybrid formalism. Even when the disformal parameter is very small, its effect on the globally accumulated phase of the gravitational waveform of an EMRI can be significant due to the large number of cycles in the LISA band made by the small compact object. We show that LISA will in principle be able to detect and measure extremely small values of the disformal parameter which in turn, can be seen as an assessment of LISA's ability to detect very small deviations from the Kerr geometry