New paper on the possibility of detecting and measuring black hole environments

Last week, Thomas Spieksma, one of the PhD students in our Strong Group, co-authored a paper which is now available to read on ArXiv. In collaboration with his old research group at the GRAPPA institute in Amsterdam, they investigate whether different black hole environments can be detected and measured with future gravitational wave detectors such as LISA. Specifically, they focus on three different environments surrounding the primary black hole in an intermediate to extreme mass ratio inspiral; accretion disks, dark matter spikes and clouds of ultralight scalar fields, also known as gravitational atoms. In the paper, it is demonstrated that we will be able to confidently distinguish between environments and that the model parameters can be reconstructed with excellent accuracy.

This paper serves as a proof of concept for distinguishing between different black hole environments. Furthermore, it will hopefully encourage the community to work on more refined analyses.