Five of the ground-breaking gravitational wave detections by the LIGO/Virgo collaboration have been interpreted as black hole collisions forming a more massive black hole. It is hard to demonstrate conclusively that these objects are indeed black holes, and there is a lively debate on the intriguing possibility that other, more exotic alternatives could explain the observations. In an article published in Physical Review Letters, Gr@v members P.
The Higgs vacuum is a metastable state with lifetime longer than the age of the universe, but the vacuum can be destabilised by microscopic black hole seeds. The nucleation process is a nice example of black hole thermodynamics.
Alexandre Pombo successfully finished his Physics M.Sc. at Aveiro University, on October 10th 2017, by defending a thesis with title "Q-balls spectroscopy and construction of boson stars". This thesis was supervised by Gr@v researchers and examined by Prof. Yves Brihaye, from the University of Mons, Belgium. Well done Alexandre!
Helgi Rúnarsson successfully defended his PhD thesis "Kerr black holes with scalar and Proca hair". The exam took place at the University of Aveir, on October 9th 2017. The thesis was supervised by Gr@v members C. Herdeiro and E. Radu and former member J. C. Degollado, now at UNAM (Mexico). Congratulations Helgi!
Carolina Benone successfully defended her PhD thesis "Scalar fields in black hole spacetimes and analogues". The exam took place in U. Federal do Pará, in Belém, Brazil, on July 14th 2017. The thesis was supervised by Luis Crispino (UFPa) and Gr@v member C. Herdeiro. Congratulations Carolina!
Our group coordinated the "Numerical Relativity and High Energy Physics" IRSES network (2012-2015). Here is a list of the global network meetings organized:
Position: Long term research fellow - CEEC Junior research position (6 years)
