Black holes with electroweak hair
When the bosonic sector of the electroweak theory is minimally coupled to General Relativity, magnetic Reissner-Nordström black holes become unstable below a critical horizon size.
High energy physics involves the study of the fundamental building blocks of nature at the shortest distances. These are the fundamental particles that are described by quantum fields such as the Higgs field found at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Our group studies theories beyond the Standard Model of particle physics both from theoretical and phenomenological perspectives.
For our latest developments/activities in this area, please see the listing below.
When the bosonic sector of the electroweak theory is minimally coupled to General Relativity, magnetic Reissner-Nordström black holes become unstable below a critical horizon size.
Gr@v PhD student Manuel Mariano is visiting Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, US, for a month. There he presented a seminar entitled “There and back again: outspiralling motion in non-Kerr compact objects”.
Romain Gervalle (Ph.D. U. Tours, France, 2025) and TianXiang Ma (M.Sc, Lanzhou U., China, 2024) have joined our group in October 2025. Ana Bokulic (Ph.D. U. Zagreb, Croatia, 2024), already a group member, also renewed her group membership into 2026. Great to have you in the group!
On Oct. 22nd 2025 we had the visit of João Dinis Álvares, who completed his M.Sc. at IST-Lisbon. João gave an interesting talk on the evolution of scalar fields around black holes and also shared with us that he decided to study physics after an outreach talk by Gr@v members, in Braga, back in 2017. Thank you João, for the kind words and all the best for your Ph.D. abroad!
We present the Einstein-Maxwell-Klein-Gordon system in hyperboloidal slices, a recent formulation for extracting signals at future null infinity. As far as we know, this is the first time this setup is evolved with a common formulation like BSSN/Z4. Using hyperboloidal slices, contrary to other recent methods like Cauchy-Characteristic Matching, we can continuously reach future null infinity.