Black Hole Mergers and the QCD Axion at Advanced LIGO

By A. Arvanitaki, M. Baryakhtar, S. Dimopoulos, S. Dubovsky, Robert Lasenby. 2016

191 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In the next few years, Advanced LIGO (aLIGO) may see gravitational waves (GWs) from thousands of black hole (BH) mergers. This marks the beginning of a new precision tool for physics. Here we show how to search for new physics beyond the standard model using this tool, in particular the QCD axion in the mass range μa∼10-14 to 10-10 eV. Axions (or any bosons) in this mass range cause rapidly rotating BHs to shed their spin into a large cloud of axions in atomic Bohr orbits around the BH, through the effect of superradiance (SR). This results in a gap in the mass vs spin distribution of BHs when the BH size is comparable to the axion’s Compton wavelength. By measuring the spin and mass of the merging objects observed at LIGO, we could verify the presence and shape of the gap in the BH distribution produced by the axion. The axion cloud can also be discovered through the GWs it radiates via axion annihilations or level transitions. A blind monochromatic GW search may reveal up to 105 BHs radiating through axion annihilations, at distinct frequencies within ∼3% of 2μa. Axion transitions probe heavier axions and may be observable in future GW observatories. The merger events are perfect candidates for a targeted GW search. If the final BH has high spin, a SR cloud may grow and emit monochromatic GWs from axion annihilations. We may observe the SR evolution in real time.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8c1400ea20f1ce4313e220b157e29143dda0ee80

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Citations in the corpus

Constraining the mass of dark photons and axion-like particles through black-hole superradiance (2018, methodology): “Building on these analysis, bounds from gravitational radiation and from the Regge plane distribution were recently derived [18, 19, 39].”
The tune of love and the nature(ness) of spacetime (2016, background): “In light of the recent direct detection of GWs with Advanced LIGO [26, 27], and by the same token, I argue here that the vanishing of Love numbers in vacuum classical general relativity opens a unique venue to test the physics of spacetime, including phenomena such as the ‘axiverse’ [28, 29] and the”
Dark Energy in Light of Multi-Messenger Gravitational-Wave Astronomy (2018, background): “, 2017) or form clouds around BHs observable with GWs (Arvanitaki et al., 2017).”
Black hole formation from axion stars (2016, unknown): “The full 3+1 dimensional solutions possible with GRChombo will allow us to study non-spherically symmetric axion stars with angular momenta, and axion star binaries, with possible applications to experimental searches for gravitational waves with LIGO [104, 105].”
AION: an atom interferometer observatory and network (2019, background): “Finally, we note that there also is a potential “monochromatic” astrophysical GW signal from quantum transitions in superradiantly-produced scalar or vector clouds around BHs [71–75].”
Superradiance (2015, methodology): “However, a very different phenomenology can be probed through detection of GWs that are possibly emitted by bosonic clouds around spinning BHs [9, 10, 444, 114, 103, 526, 118, 124, 484, 128, 127, 131, 642, 126, 652].”
The landscape of QCD axion models (2020, background): “Other observational signatures of BH superradiance are the gravitational waves produced in the transition of axions between gravitational levels or from axions annihilation to gravitons [281, 407].”