Dynamical scalarization in dynamical Chern-Simons gravity

Despite its success story to describe astrophysical phenomena, Einstein's General Relativity is not a viable candidate for quantum gravity. Among the most popular extensions of general relativity are quadratic gravity theories. In this talk, we will present first results on dynamical scalarization or descalarization of black holes in dynamical Chern-Simons gravity, in which a dynamical pseudo-scalar field is coupled to the Pontryagin density. We have performed numerical relativity simulations of binary black holes in this theory with a nonlinear coupling of the scalar field.