Juan Calderón Bustillo
IGFAE

Gravitational waves provide us with an unique opportunity to observe ultra compact objects, such as black-holes, in a highly dynamical state, as pairs of these form and merge. This allows us to study the dynamics of space-time in the strong gravity regime and, in particular, search for subtle signatures of, nowadays theoretical, exotic objects known as black-hole mimickers. Among these, so-called boson stars are especially appealing due their simplicity and the fact that the particles building them up, known as ultralight bosons, are widely considered strong candidates to form (part of) what we know as Dark Matter. In this seminar I will describe ongoing efforts to produce catalogs of numerically simulated gravitational-wave signals from boson-star mergers that can be compared to existing LIGO-Virgo data in order to look for such objects, together with the corresponding data analysis techniques. In particular, I will focus on the qualitative discussion of the phenomenology of boson-star mergers, on the analysis of several LIGO-Virgo signals under this exotic hypothesis vs. the canonical black-hole merger one and on the estimation of the putative boson-star parameters, particularly focusing on the mass of the underlying bosonic particle.