General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc)

Abstract: As one of candidate theories in the construction of regular black holes, Einstein's gravity coupled with nonlinear electrodynamics has been a topic of great concerns. Owing to the coupling between Einstein's gravity and nonlinear electrodynamics, we need to reconsider the first law of thermodynamics, which will lead to a new thermodynamic phase space. In such a phase space, the equation of state accurately describes the complete phase transition process of regular black holes. The Maxwell equal area law strictly holds when the phase transition occurs, and the entropy obeys the Bekenstein-Hawking area formula, which is compatible with the situation in Einstein's gravity.

Abstract: We study one of the interesting properties of the electromagnetic wave propagation in the curved Schwarzschild background spacetime in the framework of general relativity (GR). The electromagnetic wave equation has been derived from vacuum general relativistic Maxwell's equations. It is shown that the solutions for the electromagnetic field can be expanded in the spherical harmonic functions and all components of the electromagnetic fields can be expressed in terms of two radial profile functions. These radial profile functions can be expressed in terms of the confluent Heun function. The calculated behaviour of the electric and magnetic susceptibilities near the event horizon appears to be similar to the susceptibilities of multiferroic materials near phase transition. The Curie temperature of this phase transition appears to coincide with the Hawking temperature.

Abstract: A novel generalization of photon surfaces to the case of massive charged particles is given for spacetimes with at least one isometry, including stationary ones. A related notion of glued massive particle surfaces is also defined. These surfaces join worldlines parametrized by a family of independent conserved quantities and naturally arise in integrable spacetimes. We describe the basic geometric properties of such surfaces and their relationship to slice-reducible Killing tensors, illustrating all concepts with a number of examples. Massive particle surfaces have potential applications in the context of uniqueness theorems, Penrose inequalities, integrability, and the description of black-hole shadows in streams of massive charged particles or photons in a medium with an effective mass and charge.

Abstract: It is a well-known fact that there is no well-defined notion of conserved energy in gravity. In my opinion, it is not a big deal. As a conserved quantity, energy is a rather artificial invention which works perfectly well as long as we have a natural symmetry with respect to translations in time, however not when there ceases to be any notion of an objective time, rather than a mere coordinate. However, recently we have got an essential progress in teleparallel models of gravity, with emerging opinions of having solved the problem of energy. I explain why I think it simply makes no good sense to go for solving a non-existent problem, and the correct answer is just that in general there is no such thing as The Energy. (It has just been presented online at the Conference on Geometric Foundations of Gravity 2023 in Tartu, Estonia.)

Abstract: Gravitational lensing has been extensively observed for electromagnetic signals, but not yet for gravitational waves (GWs). Detecting lensed GWs will have many astrophysical and cosmological applications, and becomes more feasible as the sensitivity of the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA detectors improves. One of the missing ingredients to robustly identify lensed GWs is to ensure that the statistical tests used are robust under the choice of underlying waveform models. We present the first systematic study of possible waveform systematics in identifying candidates for strongly lensed GW event pairs, focusing on the posterior overlap method. To this end, we compare Bayes factors from all posteriors using different waveforms included in GWTC data releases from the first three observing runs (O1-O3). We find that waveform choice yields a wide spread of Bayes factors in some cases. However, it is likely that no event pairs from O1 to O3 were missed due to waveform choice. We also perform parameter estimation with additional waveforms for interesting cases, to understand the observed differences. We also briefly explore if computing the overlap from different runs for the same event can be a useful metric for waveform systematics or sampler issues, independent of the lensing scenario.

Abstract: Gravitational waves provide a powerful enhancement to our understanding of fundamental physics. To make the most of their detection we need to accurately model the entire process of their emission and propagation toward interferometers. Cauchy-Characteristic Extraction and Matching are methods to compute gravitational waves at null infinity, a mathematical idealization of detector location, from numerical relativity simulations. Both methods can in principle contribute to modeling by providing highly accurate gravitational waveforms. An underappreciated subtlety in realising this potential is posed by the (mere) weak hyperbolicity of the particular PDE systems solved in the characteristic formulation of the Einstein field equations. This shortcoming results from the popular choice of Bondi-like coordinates. So motivated, we construct toy models that capture that PDE structure and study Cauchy-Characteristic Extraction and Matching with them. Where possible we provide energy estimates for their solutions and perform careful numerical norm convergence tests to demonstrate the effect of weak hyperbolicity on Cauchy-Characteristic Extraction and Matching. Our findings strongly indicate that, as currently formulated, Cauchy-Characteristic Matching for the Einstein field equations would provide solutions that are, at best, convergent at an order lower than expected for the numerical method, and may be unstable. In contrast, under certain conditions, the Extraction method can provide properly convergent solutions. Establishing however that these conditions hold for the aforementioned characteristic formulations is still an open problem.

Abstract: Differentiation of the scalar Feynman propagator with respect to the spacetime coordinates yields the metric on the background spacetime that the scalar particle propagates in. Now Feynman propagators can be modified in order to include quantum-gravity corrections as induced by a zero-point length $L>0$. These corrections cause the length element $\sqrt{s^2}$ to be replaced with $\sqrt{s^2 + 4L^2}$ within the Feynman propagator. In this paper we compute the metrics derived from both the quantum-gravity free propagators and from their quantum-gravity corrected counterparts. We verify that the latter propagators yield the same spacetime metrics as the former, provided one measures distances greater than the quantum of length $L$. We perform this analysis in the case of the background spacetime $\mathbb{R}^D$ in the Euclidean sector.