Black holes as particle detectors: evolution of superradiant instabilities

By R. Brito, V. Cardoso, Paolo Pani. 2014

294 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Superradiant instabilities of spinning black holes (BHs) can be used to impose strong constraints on ultralight bosons, thus turning BHs into effective particle detectors. However, very little is known about the development of the instability and whether its nonlinear time evolution accords to the linear intuition. For the first time, we attack this problem by studying the impact of gravitational-wave (GW) emission and gas accretion on the evolution of the instability. Our quasi-adiabatic, fully-relativistic analysis shows that: (i) GW emission does not have a significant effect on the evolution of the BH, (ii) accretion plays an important role, and (iii) although the mass of the scalar cloud developed through superradiance can be a sizeable fraction of the BH mass, its energy-density is very low and backreaction is negligible. Thus, massive BHs are well described by the Kerr geometry even if they develop bosonic clouds through superradiance. Using Monte Carlo methods and very conservative assumptions, we provide strong support to the validity of the linearized analysis and to the bounds of previous studies.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c07a7a9a9a59a4bee00bcd0444d121f20599703e

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Citations in the corpus

Detecting high-frequency gravitational waves with microwave cavities (2021, background): “[104] Richard Brito, Vitor Cardoso, and Paolo Pani, “Black holes as particle detectors: evolution of superradiant instabilities,” Class.”
Superradiance: Energy Extraction, Black-Hole Bombs and Implications for Astrophysics and Particle Physics (2015, methodology): “However, by analyzing the energy and angular momentum fluxes through the BH horizon, it is reasonable to expect that a nonspherical bosonic cloud would grow near the BH on a time scale τ , extracting energy and angular momentum until superradiance stops and the cloud is slowly re-absorbed by the BH ”
Challenges and opportunities of gravitational-wave searches at MHz to GHz frequencies (2020, background): “…particles created by the gravitational superradiance of BHs (Ternov et al. 1978; Zouros and Eardley 1979; Arvanitaki et al. 2010; Arvanitaki and Dubovsky 2011; Arvanitaki and Geraci 2013; Aggarwal et al. 2020; Detweiler 1980; Yoshino and Kodama 2014; Arvanitaki et al. 2015; Brito et al. 2015a, b).”
Probing ultralight bosons with binary black holes (2018, background): “Even though this typically leads to τc ≲ 1 Myr for real fields, astrophysical processes such as accretion may alleviate the stability issue [103].”
Superradiance (2015, methodology): “This working hypothesis holds true for most of the situations of interest [114].”
Science case for the Einstein telescope (2019, background): “for particle masses of 10−21 − 10−11 eV), they can extract rotational kinetic energy from the black hole through “superradiance” to feed the formation of a bosonic “cloud” with mass up to ∼ 10% of the black hole [179–181].”
Constraining the mass of dark photons and axion-like particles through black-hole superradiance (2018, methodology): “Nonlinear evolutions are still in their infancy [26], but as we remarked it is thought that backreaction can be included using a perturbative approach [18, 30, 43].”