Black Holes, Gravitational Waves and the Early Universe: Quantum Fluctuations, Backreaction, Information and Structures

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This award supports a program of theoretical research on consequences of quantum field processes both at the late stage of the evolution of black holes and at the initial stage of the early universe. A framework called stochastic gravity is used to study these issues because it is especially well suited for treating quantum field fluctuations that have not been included in previous work on these topics. Quantitative results may be obtained from the Einstein-Langevin equation defining this framework. Techniques and concepts from quantuminformation theory are also used to address the black hole information issue. These methods may also be used to calculate the gravitational wave form and emitted energy from binary systems potentially detectable by LIGO and LISA. Determination of the magnitude of metric fluctuations near the black hole horizon due to quantum fields is essential to finding a solution to the backreaction problem: how Hawking radiation affects the state and dynamics of a black hole, both under quasi-equilibrium (in a box) and non-equilibrium (evaporating) conditions. Stochastic gravity provides an easier to implement route towards structure formation from second order metric perturbations needed in inflationary cosmologies based on higher order curvature theories. A new formulation of gravitational wave dynamics for binary masses with radiation reaction is useful for treating the self force on the small mass and backreaction of it on the motion of the large mass self-consistently without making the slow motion or the weak field assumptions.