Black holes and scalar hair

Authors

  • Thomas Sotiriou University of Nottingham, United Kingdom

Abstract

According to General Relativity, astrophysical black holes are remarkably simple and their properties are determined by just two quantities, their mass and their angular moment. Gravitational waves and other strong gravity observations promise to probe the nature of black holes more precisely that ever before. Any observed deviation from the simple description General Relativity provides can reveal the existence of new fundamental fields, which would signal a paradigm shift in theoretical physics, astrophysics, and cosmology. I will use the well-studied case of an additional new scalar field, coming from either an extension of the Standard Model or of General Relativity itself, as a case study to discuss three questions: Can new physics leave an imprint on black holes? If yes, which observations are more sensitive to this new physics? And, are all black holes the same?

Author Biography

  • Thomas Sotiriou, University of Nottingham, United Kingdom

    Thomas Sotiriou completed his PhD in Astroparticle Physics at SISSA, Italy in 2007. He then pursued a postdoctoral position at the Center for Fundamental Physics at the University of Maryland, College Park, USA from 2007 to 2009. Following this, he worked as a postdoc and later became a Marie Curie Fellow at DAMPT in Cambridge, UK from 2009 to 2011. He worked as an Assistant Professor at SISSA, Italy from 2011 to 2013.
    He later become an Associate Professor and Reader from 2013 to 2017, at the School of Mathematical Sciences and School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Nottingham, UK, where he is now a full Professor since 2017. He is also the Head of the Mathematical Physics Section of the School of Mathematical Sciences since 2022, and he is the Founding Director of the Nottingham Centre of Gravity, University of Nottingham since 2020.

SPP2024 Proceedings Cover

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Published

2024-07-02

Issue

2024: Proceedings of the 42nd Samahang Pisika ng Pilipinas Physics Conference

Section

Invited Presentations

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How to Cite

[1]
“Black holes and scalar hair”, Proc. SPP, vol. 42, no. 1, p. SPP-2024-INV-1F-01, Jul. 2024, Accessed: Mar. 23, 2026. [Online]. Available: https://proceedings.spp-online.org/article/view/SPP-2024-INV-1F-01