Christopher Harvey-Hawes’s scientific contributions

Disc galaxies represent a promising laboratory for the study of gravitational physics, including alternatives to dark matter, owing to the possibility of coupling rotation curves' dynamical data with strong gravitational lensing observations. In particular, Euclid, DES and LSST are predicted to observe hundreds of thousands of gravitational lenses. Here, we investigate disc galaxy strong gravitational lensing in the MOND framework. We employ the concept of equivalent Newtonian systems within the quasi-linear MOND formulation to make use of the standard lensing formalism. We derive the phantom dark matter distribution predicted for realistic disc galaxy models and study the impact of morphological and mass parameters on the expected lensing. We find purely MONDian effects dominate the lensing and generate non-trivial correlations between the lens parameters and the lensing cross section. Moreover, we show that the standard realisation of MOND predicts a number count of disc galaxy lenses of one order of magnitude higher than the dark matter-driven predictions, making it distinguishable from the latter in upcoming surveys. Finally, we show that disc galaxy gravitational lensing can be used to strongly constrain the interpolating function of MOND.

Strong gravitational lens system catalogues are typically used to constrain a combination of cosmological and empirical power-law lens mass model parameters, often introducing additional empirical parameters and constraints from high resolution imagery. We investigate these lens models using Bayesian methods through a novel alternative that treats spatial curvature via the non-FLRW timescape cosmology. We apply Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods using the catalogue of 161 lens systems of Chen et al. (2019) in order to constrain both lens and cosmological parameters for: (i) the standard ΛCDM model with zero spatial curvature; and (ii) the timescape model. We then generate large mock data sets to further investigate the choice of cosmology on fitting simple power-law lens models. In agreement with previous results, we find that in combination with single isothermal sphere parameters, models with zero FLRW spatial curvature fit better as the free parameter approaches an unphysical empty universe, ΩM0 → 0. By contrast, the timescape cosmology is found to prefer parameter values in which its cosmological parameter, the present void fraction, is driven to fv0 → 0.73 and closely matches values that best fit independent cosmological data sets: supernovae Ia distances and the cosmic microwave background. This conclusion holds for a large range of seed values fv0 ∈ {0.1, 0.9}, and for timescape fits to both timescape and FLRW mocks. Regardless of cosmology, unphysical estimates of the distance ratios given from power-law lens models result in poor goodness of fit. With larger datasets soon available, separation of cosmology and lens models must be addressed.

We bring the Kerr--Newman spacetime into the Bondi--Sachs gauge by means of zero angular momentum, null geodesics. We compute the memory effect produced at the black hole horizon by a transient gravitational shock wave, which from future null infinity is seen as a Bondi-Metzner-Sachs supertranslation. This results in a change of the supertransformation charges at infinity between the spacetime geometries defined by the black hole before, and after, the shockwave scattering. For an extremal Kerr--Newman black hole, we give the complementary description of this process in the near-horizon limit, as seen by an observer hovering over the horizon. In this limit, we compute the supertranformation charges and compare them to those calculated at null infinity. We analyze the effect of these transformations on the electromagnetic gauge field and explore the self-interaction between this and the angular momentum of the black hole.