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.
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!
Dyson, just before the first detection of Gravitational Waves (GWs) by LIGO, raised the question of whether the detection of a single graviton can be achieved with GW strain detectors. If this is possible, then it would be a direct evidence for the quantization of the gravitational field.
Spontaneous scalarization is a mechanism that allows black holes to develop a non-trivial profile of a scalar field “scalar hair” because of tachyonic instabilities, enabling tests of gravity beyond General Relativity.
A Black Hole is Born: 3D GRMHD Simulation of Black Hole Formation from Core-Collaps
Goni Halevi, Swapnil Shankar, Philipp Mösta, Roland Haas, Erik Schnetter
| arXiv:2506.20837 [astro-ph.HE] |
On Thursday Oct 23rd, CERN organizes a topical meeting on "New Bosons from Astrophysical sources @ LHC: the case of boson stars". C. Herdeiro is one of the invited speakers.
Two 3-month grants for M.Sc. holders are open within the project 2024.05617.CERN, "Towards precision tests of ultralight dark matter with imaging and gravitational waves". Applications should be submitted between 13 and 24 October 2025. More info in the attached files and the Euraxess site.
In the last year three Gr@v members obtained faculty positions (as Assistant Professors) in Portuguese Universities: António Morais (Physics Dept., U. Minho), Miguel Zilhão (Physics Dept., U. Aveiro), Pedro Cunha (Mathematics Dept., U. Aveiro). Congratulations to António, Miguel and Pedro for this great achievement!
The annual global study led by John Ioannidis (Stanford University, USA), based on Elsevier’s Scopus citation data for 2024, ranked the world’s most influential scientists. The list includes 3 from Gr@v: P. Cunha, C. Herdeiro and E. Radu. See here the U. Aveiro coverage.
The VII Amazonian Symposium in Physics took place in the week of Sep. 23rd 2025. Another stimulating meeting with great talks and scientific interaction. Thank you to all participants and Prof. Luis Crispino for his leadership.