Por Miguel Zilhão (CENTRA - Center for Astrophysics and Gravitation, Instituto Superior Técnico).
We show that light scalars can form quasibound states around binaries. In the nonrelativistic regime, these states are formally described by the quantum-mechanical Schrodinger equation for a one-electron heteronuclear diatomic molecule. We performed extensive numerical simulations of scalar fields around black hole binaries showing that a scalar structure condenses around the binary -- we dub these states "gravitational molecules". We further show that these are well described by the perturbative, nonrelativistic description.
Short Bio: Miguel Zilhão graduated in Physics in 2008 at FCUP and finished his PhD in 2012 through the MAP-fis doctoral programme at the Universities of Porto and Aveiro. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the Rochester Institute of Technology (Rochester, New York) and at the University of Barcelona. Since 2017 he has been an FCT Researcher at CENTRA, IST. He works in General Relativity and is the author of several codes and tools dedicated to the numerical solving of Einstein's equations.
