Gr@v's Ph.D. student Mengjie Wang successfully defended his doctoral thesis with title "Quantum and classical aspects of scalar and vector fields around black holes", on February 29th 2016. Mengjie integrated the MAP-Fis Ph.D. programme and was supported by a grant from the IDPASC doctoral programme. Congratulations Mengjie!
The 2015 paper highlights of the International Journal of Modern Physics D, includes the paper "Asymptotically flat black holes with scalar hair: a review" by Gr@v researchers C. Herdeiro and E. Radu.
The annuncement about the detection of gravitational waves got the attention of Portuguese media, with some contributions from our group:
Interview in Jornal 2, 11th February 2016
On February 11th 2016, the LIGO collaboration announced the first direct detection of gravitational waves. Our group warmly congratulates LIGO for this extraordinary achievement, which opens up access to a new layer of the physical reality!
Abstract: We investigate the thermodynamics of spherically symmetric black hole solutions in a four-dimensional Einstein--Yang-Mills-SU(2) theory with a negative cosmological constant. Special attention is paid to configurations with a unit magnetic charge.
Gr@v researchers have found that there are only two equilibrium possibilities for the spin of black hole binaries, and that they are similar to the equilibria observed for the spin of the Moon, which was identified by Giovanni Domenico Cassini in 1693. The results were published this week in MNRAS Letters.
This year's Chilean school on gravitation took place in Concepción, from 4-8 January, focused on black holes and solitons. One of the invited lecturers was Gr@v member C. Herdeiro, delivering a five lectures course on "Asymptotically flat black holes with scalar hair in four spacetime dimensions."
Abstract: Spontaneous scalarization is a scenario in some scalar-tensor theories of gravity where non-perturbative (order-of-unity strength) scalar fields can develop near neutron stars.