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’.

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Abstract. A classical pp-wave is a 4-dimensional Lorentzian spacetime which admits a nonvanishing parallel spinor field; here the connection is assumed to be Levi-Civita. We generalise this definition to metric compatible spacetimes with torsion and describe basic properties of such spacetimes. We use our generalised pp-waves for constructing new explicit vacuum solutions of quadratic metric-affine gravity.

In this paper we deal with quadratic metric-affine gravity, which we briefly introduce, explain and give historical and physical reasons for using this particular theory of gravity. We then introduce a generalisation of well known spacetimes, namely pp-waves. A classical pp-wave is a 4-dimensional Lorentzian spacetime which admits a nonvanishing parallel spinor field; here the connection is assumed to be Levi-Civita. This definition was generalised in our previous work to metric compatible spacetimes with torsion and used to construct new explicit vacuum solutions of quadratic metric-affine gravity, namely generalised pp-waves of parallel Ricci curvature. The physical interpretation of these solutions we propose in this article is that they represent a conformally invariant metric-affine model for a massless elementary particle. We give a comparison with the classical model describing the interaction of gravitational and massless neutrino fields, namely Einstein-Weyl theory and construct pp-wave type solutions of this theory. We point out that generalised pp-waves of parallel Ricci curvature are very similar to pp-wave type solutions of the Einstein-Weyl model and therefore propose that our generalised pp-waves of parallel Ricci curvature represent a metric-affine model for the massless neutrino.