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Olmo, G. J., & Rubiera-Garcia, D. (2014). Semiclassical geons at particle accelerators. J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys., 02(2), 010–25pp.
Abstract: We point out that in certain four-dimensional extensions of general relativity constructed within the Palatini formalism stable self-gravitating objects with a discrete mass and charge spectrum may exist. The incorporation of nonlinearities in the electromagnetic field may effectively reduce their mass spectrum by many orders of magnitude. As a consequence, these objects could be within (or near) the reach of current particle accelerators. We provide an exactly solvable model to support this idea.
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Martinelli, M., Scarcella, F., Hogg, N. B., Kavanagh, B. J., Gaggero, D., & Fleury, P. (2022). Dancing in the dark: detecting a population of distant primordial black holes. J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys., 08(8), 006–47pp.
Abstract: Primordial black holes (PBHs) are compact objects proposed to have formed in the early Universe from the collapse of small-scale over-densities. Their existence may be detected from the observation of gravitational waves (GWs) emitted by PBH mergers, if the signals can be distinguished from those produced by the merging of astrophysical black holes. In this work, we forecast the capability of the Einstein Telescope, a proposed third-generation GW observatory, to identify and measure the abundance of a subdominant population of distant PBHs, using the difference in the redshift evolution of the merger rate of the two populations as our discriminant. We carefully model the merger rates and generate realistic mock catalogues of the luminosity distances and errors that would be obtained from GW signals observed by the Einstein Telescope. We use two independent statistical methods to analyse the mock data, finding that, with our more powerful, likelihood-based method, PBH abundances as small as fPBH approximate to 7 x 10(-6) ( fPBH approximate to 2 x 10(-6)) would be distinguishable from f(PBH) = 0 at the level of 3 sigma with a one year (ten year) observing run of the Einstein Telescope. Our mock data generation code, darksirens, is fast, easily extendable and publicly available on GitLab.
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Agius, D., Essig, R., Gaggero, D., Scarcella, F., Suczewski, G., & Valli, M. (2024). Feedback in the dark: a critical examination of CMB bounds on primordial black holes. J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys., 07(7), 003–36pp.
Abstract: If present in the early universe, primordial black holes (PBHs) would have accreted matter and emitted high-energy photons, altering the statistical properties of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). This mechanism has been used to constrain the fraction of dark matter that is in the form of PBHs to be much smaller than unity for PBH masses well above one solar mass. Moreover, the presence of dense dark matter mini -halos around the PBHs has been used to set even more stringent constraints, as these would boost the accretion rates. In this work, we critically revisit CMB constraints on PBHs taking into account the role of the local ionization of the gas around them. We discuss how the local increase in temperature around PBHs can prevent the dark matter mini -halos from strongly enhancing the accretion process, in some cases significantly weakening previously derived CMB constraints. We explore in detail the key ingredients of the CMB bound and derive a conservative limit on the cosmological abundance of massive PBHs.
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Beltran Jimenez, J., Heisenberg, L., Olmo, G. J., & Rubiera-Garcia, D. (2018). Born-Infeld inspired modifications of gravity. Phys. Rep., 727, 1–129.
Abstract: General Relativity has shown an outstanding observational success in the scales where it has been directly tested. However, modifications have been intensively explored in the regimes where it seems either incomplete or signals its own limit of validity. In particular, the breakdown of unitarity near the Planck scale strongly suggests that General Relativity needs to be modified at high energies and quantum gravity effects are expected to be important. This is related to the existence of spacetime singularities when the solutions of General Relativity are extrapolated to regimes where curvatures are large. In this sense, Born-Infeld inspired modifications of gravity have shown an extraordinary ability to regularise the gravitational dynamics, leading to non-singular cosmologies and regular black hole spacetimes in a very robust manner and without resorting to quantum gravity effects. This has boosted the interest in these theories in applications to stellar structure, compact objects, inflationary scenarios, cosmological singularities, and black hole and wormhole physics, among others. We review the motivations, various formulations, and main results achieved within these theories, including their observational viability, and provide an overview of current open problems and future research opportunities.
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