Gravitational wave searches for ultralight bosons with LIGO and LISA

By R. Brito, Shrobana Ghosh, E. Barausse, Emanuele Berti, V. Cardoso, I. Dvorkin, A. Klein, Paolo Pani. 2017

215 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Ultralight bosons can induce superradiant instabilities in spinning black holes, tapping their rotational energy to trigger the growth of a bosonic condensate. Possible observational imprints of these boson clouds include (i) direct detection of the nearly monochromatic (resolvable or stochastic) gravitational waves emitted by the condensate, and (ii) statistically significant evidence for the formation of ``holes'' at large spins in the spin versus mass plane (sometimes also referred to as ``Regge plane'') of astrophysical black holes. In this work, we focus on the prospects of LISA and LIGO detecting or constraining scalars with mass in the range ${m}_{s}\ensuremath{\in}[{10}^{\ensuremath{-}19},{10}^{\ensuremath{-}15}]\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{eV}$ and ${m}_{s}\ensuremath{\in}[{10}^{\ensuremath{-}14},{10}^{\ensuremath{-}11}]\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{eV}$, respectively. Using astrophysical models of black-hole populations calibrated to observations and black-hole perturbation theory calculations of the gravitational emission, we find that, in optimistic scenarios, LIGO could observe a stochastic background of gravitational radiation in the range ${m}_{s}\ensuremath{\in}[2\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}{10}^{\ensuremath{-}13},{10}^{\ensuremath{-}12}]\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{eV}$, and up to $1{0}^{4}$ resolvable events in a 4-year search if ${m}_{s}\ensuremath{\sim}3\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}{10}^{\ensuremath{-}13}\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{eV}$. LISA could observe a stochastic background for boson masses in the range ${m}_{s}\ensuremath{\in}[5\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}{10}^{\ensuremath{-}19},5\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}{10}^{\ensuremath{-}16}]$, and up to $\ensuremath{\sim}{10}^{3}$ resolvable events in a 4-year search if ${m}_{s}\ensuremath{\sim}{10}^{\ensuremath{-}17}\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{eV}$. LISA could further measure spins for black-hole binaries with component masses in the range $[{10}^{3},{10}^{7}]{M}_{\ensuremath{\bigodot}}$, which is not probed by traditional spin-measurement techniques. A statistical analysis of the spin distribution of these binaries could either rule out scalar fields in the mass range $\ensuremath{\sim}[4\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}{10}^{\ensuremath{-}18},{10}^{\ensuremath{-}14}]\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{eV}$, or measure ${m}_{s}$ with ten percent accuracy if light scalars in the mass range $\ensuremath{\sim}[{10}^{\ensuremath{-}17},{10}^{\ensuremath{-}13}]\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{eV}$ exist.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9bb9abf05e081e46cf3504c34bbac3c43e0ecc3c

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Citations in the corpus

Probing ultralight bosons with binary black holes (2018, background): “be detectable only within our own galaxy, while those with larger values of , and bigger masses, may be observed at extra-galactic distances. Further discussion and detailed forecasts can be found in [100,109{111]. Resonant extinction/attenuation When the BH-cloud is part of a binary system, the clo”
The spectra of gravitational atoms (2019, background): “While superradiance with scalar fields has been studied extensively in the past [6–18], the exploration of vector fields is much more recent [19–28].”
Science case for the Einstein telescope (2019, background): “ion, through the emission of nearly monochromatic gravitational waves which could be detected either directly or as a stochastic background from a large number of such objects throughout the Universe [182,183]. Additionally, measuring the distribution of black hole masses and spins can yield an indi”
Constraining the mass of dark photons and axion-like particles through black-hole superradiance (2018, methodology): “[18, 19] for the scalar case), the study of the evolution of the superradiant instability in the case of real fields (extending the recent numerical analysis of ref.”
Challenges and opportunities of gravitational-wave searches at MHz to GHz frequencies (2020, background): “[65–67].”
Recent Progress in the Physics of Axions and Axion-Like Particles (2020, methodology): “Then the axion mass range 10−13−10−12 eV is also ruled out by the null results of such GWs in the LIGO/Virgo data [85–91].”