Acoustic black holes

We discuss some general aspects of acoustic black holes. We begin by describing the associated formalism with which acoustic black holes are established, then we show how to model arbitrary geometries by using a de Laval nozzle. It is argued that even though the Hawking temperature of these black holes is too low to be detected, acoustic black holes have interesting classical properties, some of which are outlined here, that should be explored.Comment: 13 pages, 9 Figures, ReVTeX4. Based on a talk delivered at the Fifth Meeting on New Worlds in Astroparticle Physics (Faro, Portugal, 8-10 January 2005). Updated references and overall improvemen

Tests for the existence of horizons through gravitational wave echoes

The existence of black holes and of spacetime singularities is a fundamental issue in science. Despite this, observations supporting their existence are scarce, and their interpretation unclear. We overview how strong a case for black holes has been made in the last few decades, and how well observations adjust to this paradigm. Unsurprisingly, we conclude that observational proof for black holes is impossible to come by. However, just like Popper's black swan, alternatives can be ruled out or confirmed to exist with a single observation. These observations are within reach. In the next few years and decades, we will enter the era of precision gravitational-wave physics with more sensitive detectors. Just as accelerators require larger and larger energies to probe smaller and smaller scales, more sensitive gravitational-wave detectors will be probing regions closer and closer to the horizon, potentially reaching Planck scales and beyond. What may be there, lurking?Comment: Published in Nature Astronomy, expanded version with further details available at arXiv:1707.0302

On the instability of Reissner-Nordstrom black holes in de Sitter backgrounds

Recent numerical investigations have uncovered a surprising result: Reissner-Nordstrom-de Sitter black holes are unstable for spacetime dimensions larger than 6. Here we prove the existence of such instability analytically, and we compute the timescale in the near-extremal limit. We find very good agreement with the previous numerical results. Our results may me helpful in shedding some light on the nature of the instability.Comment: Published in Phys.Rev.

Scattering of point particles by black holes: gravitational radiation

Gravitational waves can teach us not only about sources and the environment where they were generated, but also about the gravitational interaction itself. Here we study the features of gravitational radiation produced during the scattering of a point-like mass by a black hole. Our results are exact (to numerical error) at any order in a velocity expansion, and are compared against various approximations. At large impact parameter and relatively small velocities our results agree to within percent level with various post-Newtonian and weak-field results. Further, we find good agreement with scaling predictions in the weak-field/high-energy regime. Lastly, we achieve striking agreement with zero-frequency estimates.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figure

On the nonlinear instability of confined geometries

The discovery of a "weakly-turbulent" instability of anti-de Sitter spacetime supports the idea that confined fluctuations eventually collapse to black holes and suggests that similar phenomena might be possible in asymptotically-flat spacetime, for example in the context of spherically symmetric oscillations of stars or nonradial pulsations of ultracompact objects. Here we present a detailed study of the evolution of the Einstein-Klein-Gordon system in a cavity, with different types of deformations of the spectrum, including a mass term for the scalar and Neumann conditions at the boundary. We provide numerical evidence that gravitational collapse always occurs, at least for amplitudes that are three orders of magnitude smaller than Choptuik's critical value and corresponding to more than $10^5$ reflections before collapse. The collapse time scales as the inverse square of the initial amplitude in the small-amplitude limit. In addition, we find that fields with nonresonant spectrum collapse earlier than in the fully-resonant case, a result that is at odds with the current understanding of the process. Energy is transferred through a direct cascade to high frequencies when the spectrum is resonant, but we observe both direct- and inverse-cascade effects for nonresonant spectra. Our results indicate that a fully-resonant spectrum might not be a crucial ingredient of the conjectured turbulent instability and that other mechanisms might be relevant. We discuss how a definitive answer to this problem is essentially impossible within the present framework.Comment: 14 pages, 9 figures; v2:Some improvements in convergence results, accepted for publication in Physical Review

Hawking emission of gravitons in higher dimensions: non-rotating black holes

We compute the absorption cross section and the total power carried by gravitons in the evaporation process of a higher-dimensional non-rotating black hole. These results are applied to a model of extra dimensions with standard model fields propagating on a brane. The emission of gravitons in the bulk is highly enhanced as the spacetime dimensionality increases. The implications for the detection of black holes in particle colliders and ultrahigh-energy cosmic ray air showers are briefly discussed.Comment: 16 pages, no figures, revtex4. v3: Misprints in Tables and four-dimensional power for fermions correcte

Particle creation in gravitational collapse to a horizonless compact object

Black holes (BHs) play a central role in physics. However, gathering observational evidence for their existence is a notoriously difficult task. Current strategies to quantify the evidence for BHs all boil down to looking for signs of highly compact, horizonless bodies. Here, we study particle creation by objects which collapse to form ultra-compact configurations, with surface at an areal radius $R=R_{f}$ satisfying $1-(2M/R_{f})= \epsilon^{2}\ll 1$ with $M$ the object mass. We assume that gravitational collapse proceeds in a `standard' manner until $R=R_{f}+2M \epsilon^{2\beta}$, where $\beta>0$, and then slows down to form a static object of radius $R_{f}$. In the standard collapsing phase, Hawking-like thermal radiation is emitted, which is as strong as the Hawking radiation of a BH with the same mass but lasts only for \sim 40~(M/M_{\odot})[44+\ln (10^{-19}/\epsilon)]~\mu \mbox{s}. Thereafter, in a very large class of models, there exist two bursts of radiation separated by a very long dormant stage. The first burst occurs at the end of the transient Hawking radiation, and is followed by a quiescent stage which lasts for \sim 6\times 10^{6}~(\epsilon/10^{-19})^{-1}(M/M_{\odot})~\mbox{yr}. Afterwards, the second burst is triggered, after which there is no more particle production and the star is forever dark. In a model with $\beta=1$, both the first and second bursts outpower the transient Hawking radiation by a factor $\sim 10^{38}(\epsilon/10^{-19})^{-2}$.Comment: 30 pages, 6 figures, typos corrected, minor correctio