The grand challenges of contemporary fundamental physics—dark matter, dark energy, vacuum energy, inflation and early universe cosmology, singularities and the hierarchy problem—all involve gravity as a key component. And of all gravitational phenomena, black holes stand out in their elegant simplicity, while harbouring some of the most remarkable predictions of General Relativity: event horizons, singularities and ergoregions. The hitherto invisible landscape of the gravitational Universe is being unveiled before our eyes: the historical direct detection of gravitational waves by the LIGO-Virgo collaboration marks the dawn of a new era of scientific exploration. Gravitational-wave astronomy will allow us to test models of black hole formation, growth and evolution, as well as models of gravitational-wave generation and propagation. It will provide evidence for event horizons and ergoregions, test the theory of General Relativity itself, and may reveal the existence of new fundamental fields. The synthesis of these results has the potential to radically reshape our understanding of the cosmos and of the laws of Nature. The purpose of this work is to present a concise, yet comprehensive overview of the state of the art in the relevant fields of research, summarize important open problems, and lay out a roadmap for future progress. This write-up is an initiative taken within the framework of the European Action on ‘Black holes, Gravitational waves and Fundamental Physics’.

In this paper we show that there is a universal prediction for the Newtonian potential for a specific class of infinite derivative, ghost-free, quadratic curvature gravity. We show that in order to make such a theory ghost-free at a perturbative level, the Newtonian potential always falls-off as 1/r in the infrared limit, while at short distances the potential becomes non-singular. We provide examples which can potentially test the scale of gravitational non-locality up to 0.004 eV.

We show that most classes of shift-symmetric degenerate higher-order scalar-tensor (DHOST) theories which satisfy certain degeneracy conditions are not compatible with the conditions for the existence of exact black hole solutions with a linearly time-dependent scalar field whose canonical kinetic term takes a constant value. Combined with constraints from the propagation speed of gravitational waves, our results imply that cubic DHOST theories are strongly disfavoured and that pure quadratic theories are likely to be the most viable class of DHOST theories. We find exact static and spherically symmetric (Schwarzschild and Schwarzschild-(anti-)de Sitter) black hole solutions in all shift-symmetric higher-derivative scalar-tensor theories which contain up to cubic order terms of the second-order derivatives of the scalar field, especially the full class of Horndeski and Gleyzes-Langlois-Piazza-Vernizzi theories. After deriving the conditions for the coupling functions in the DHOST Lagrangian that allow the exact solutions, we clarify their compatibility with the degeneracy conditions.

We investigate static and spherically symmetric black hole (BH) solutions in shift-symmetric quadratic-order degenerate higher-order scalar-tensor (DHOST) theories. We allow a nonconstant kinetic term X = g µν ∂µφ∂ν φ for the scalar field φ and assume that φ is, like the spacetime, a pure function of the radial coordinate r, namely φ = φ(r). First, we find analytic static and spherically symmetric vacuum solutions in the so-called Class Ia DHOST theories, which include the quartic Horndeski theories as a subclass. We consider several explicit models in this class and apply our scheme to find the exact vacuum BH solutions. BH solutions obtained in our analysis are neither Schwarzschild or Schwarzschild (anti-) de Sitter. We show that a part of the BH solutions obtained in our analysis are free of ghost and Laplacian instabilities and are also mode stable against the oddparity perturbations. Finally, we argue the case that the scalar field has a linear time dependence φ = qt + ψ(r) and show several simple examples of nontrivial BH solutions with a nonconstant kinetic term obtained analytically and numerically. I. INTRODUCTIONScalar-tensor theories have provided the unified mathematical description of modified gravity theories [1]. In classic scalar-tensor theories, whose Lagrangian density depends on the metric g µν , the scalar field φ, and its first-order derivative φ µ := ∇ µ φ, L = L(g µν , φ, φ µ ), the Euler-Lagrange (EL) equations are given by the second-order differential equations. However, the Lagrangian density of modern scalar-tensor theories may also contain the second-order derivatives of the scalar field φ µν := ∇ µ ∇ ν φ. Although generically the EL equations in such theories contain higher derivative terms, the appearance of Ostrogradsky ghosts [2] can be avoided using certain degeneracy conditions [3]. Degenerate higher-order scalar-tensor (DHOST) theories [4-9] (see also [10,11]) provide the most general framework of scalar-tensor theories which are free from Ostrogradsky instabilities [2], and hence the system contains only three degrees of freedom (DOFs), namely, two tensorial and one scalar polarizations (See § II for details). Applications of DHOST theories to cosmological and astrophysical problems have been investigated in Refs. [9,[12][13][14][15].The application of modern scalar-tensor theories to BH physics has attracted great interest. Besides the Schwarzschild or Kerr solutions in General Relativity (GR) with or without a constant scalar field [16,17], i.e. GR BH solutions, they also allow BH solutions which are absent in GR. A typical nontrivial BH solution is the stealth Schwarzschild solution [18,19] obtained in shift-symmetric Horndeski theories with the assumptions of a linearly time-dependent scalar field φ = qt + ψ(r) and a constant kinetic term X = const, where t and r are the time and radial coordinates of the static and spherically symmetric spacetime and X := g µν φ µ φ ν represents the canonical kinetic term of the scalar field. In stealth solutions, the spacetime geometry ...

In this paper we wish to find the corresponding Gibbons-Hawking-York term for the most general quadratic in curvature gravity by using Coframe slicing within the Arnowitt-Deser-Misner (ADM) decomposition of spacetime in four dimensions. In order to make sure that the higher derivative gravity is ghost and tachyon free at a perturbative level, one requires infinite covariant derivatives, which yields a generalised covariant infinite derivative theory of gravity. We will be exploring the boundary term for such a covariant infinite derivative theory of gravity.