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Khoury, Justin

Publications and source records attributed to Khoury, Justin.

12 records
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2024

Tidal Love numbers and Green’s functions in black hole spacetimes

Tidal interactions play a crucial role in deciphering gravitational wave signals emitted by the coalescence of binary systems. They are usually quantified by a set of complex coefficients which include tidal Love numbers, describing the conservative response to an external perturbation. In the static case, these are found to vanish exactly for asymptotically flat black holes in general relativity in four space-time dimensions, and recently they have been generalized to dynamical interactions. In the context of response theory, the retarded Green’s function provides the complete description of the behavior of dynamical systems. Here, in this work we investigate the relation between Love numbers and Green’s functions, and highlight the relevance of radiation reaction effects to their connection. As a special case, we discuss Banados-Teitelboim-Zanelli black holes, where the absence of radiative modes allows us to make a direct link between them.

classical black holes↗
DOE OSTI2023

Implications of the weak gravity conjecture for tidal Love numbers of black holes

The weak gravity conjecture indicates that extremal black holes in the low-energy effective field theory should be able to decay. This criterion gives rise to nontrivial constraints on the coefficients of higher-order derivative corrections to gravity. In this paper, we investigate the tidal deformability of neutral black holes due to higher-order derivative corrections. As a proof of concept, we consider a correction of cubic order in the Riemann curvature tensor. The tidal Love numbers of neutral black holes receive leading-order corrections from higher-order derivative terms, since black holes in pure General Relativity have vanishing tidal Love number. We conclude that the interplay between the tidal deformability of black holes and the weak gravity conjecture provides useful information about the effective field theory.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2023

Superfluid dark matter around black holes

Superfluid dark matter, consisting of self-interacting light particles that thermalize and condense to form a superfluid in galaxies, provides a novel theory that matches the success of the standard ΛCDM model on cosmological scales while simultaneously offering a rich phenomenology on galactic scales. Within galaxies, the dark matter density profile consists of a nearly homogeneous superfluid core surrounded by an isothermal envelope. In this work we compute the density profile of superfluid dark matter around supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies. Here, in this work, we show that, depending on the fluid equation of state, the dark matter profile presents distinct power-law behaviors, which can be used to distinguish it from the standard results for collisionless dark matter.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2023

Stability of hairy black holes in shift-symmetric scalar-tensor theories via the effective field theory approach

Shift-symmetric Horndeski theories admit an interesting class of Schwarzschild-de Sitter black hole solutions exhibiting time-dependent scalar hair. The properties of these solutions may be studied via a bottom-up effective field theory (EFT) based on the background symmetries. This is in part possible by making use of a convenient coordinate choice — Lemaître-type coordinates — in which the profile of the Horndeski scalar field is linear in the relevant time coordinate. We construct this EFT, and use it to understand the stability of hairy black holes in shift-symmetric Horndeski theories, providing a set of constraints that the otherwise-free functions appearing in the Horndeski Lagrangian must satisfy in order to admit stable black hole solutions. The EFT is analyzed in the decoupling limit to understand potential sources of instability. Further, we also perform a complete analysis of the EFT with odd-parity linear perturbations around general spherically symmetric space-time.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2022

Early-time measure in eternal inflation

In a situation like eternal inflation, where our data is replicated at infinitely-many other space-time events, it is necessary to make a prior assumption about our location to extract predictions. The principle of mediocrity entails that we live at asymptotic late times, when the occupational probabilities of vacua has settled to a near-equilibrium distribution. In this paper we further develop the idea that we instead exist during the approach to equilibrium, much earlier than the exponentially-long mixing time. In this case we are most likely to reside in vacua that are easily accessed dynamically. Using first-passage statistics, we prove that vacua that maximize their space-time volume at early times have: 1. maximal ever-hitting probability; 2. minimal mean first-passage time; and 3. minimal decay rate. These requirements are succinctly captured by an early-time measure. The idea that we live at early times is a predictive guiding principle, with many phenomenological implications. First, our vacuum should lie deep in a funneled region, akin to folding energy landscapes of proteins. Second, optimal landscape regions are characterized by relatively short-lived vacua, with lifetime of order the de Sitter Page time. For our vacuum, this lifetime is ~ 10 130 years, which is consistent with the Standard Model estimate due to Higgs metastability. Third, the measure favors vacua with small, positive vacuum energy. This can address the cosmological constant problem, provided there are sufficiently many vacua in the entire ensemble of funnels. As a concrete example, we study the Bousso-Polchinski lattice of flux vacua, and find that the early-time measure favors lattices with the fewest number of flux dimensions. This favors compactifications with a large hierarchy between the lightest modulus and all other Kähler and complex structure moduli.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2022

Chameleon early dark energy and the Hubble tension

Early dark energy (EDE) offers a particularly interesting theoretical approach to the Hubble tension, albeit one that introduces its own set of challenges, including a new “why then” problem related to the EDE injection time at matter-radiation equality, and a mild worsening of the large-scale structure (LSS) tension. Both these challenges center on the properties of dark matter, which becomes the dominant component of the Universe at EDE injection and is also responsible for seeding LSS. Driven by this, we present the potential of couplings between EDE and dark matter to address these challenges, focusing on a mechanism similar to chameleon dark energy theories, deeming this chameleon early dark energy (CEDE). We present relevant background and perturbation equations and study the dynamics of the case of a quartic scalar potential and an exponential coupling.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗
DOE OSTI2022

Dark Matter Superfluidity

In these lectures I describe a theory of dark matter superfluidity developed in the last few years. The dark matter particles are axion-like, with masses of order eV. They Bose-Einstein condense into a superfluid phase in the central regions of galaxy halos. The superfluid phonon excitations in turn couple to baryons and mediate a long-range force (beyond Newtonian gravity). For a suitable choice of the superfluid equation of state, this force reproduces the various galactic scaling relations embodied in Milgrom's law. Thus the dark matter and modified gravity phenomena represent different phases of a single underlying substance, unified through the rich and well-studied physics of superfluidity.

Khoury, Justin↗