REVIEW 6 cited by
Constraints on ultralight scalar bosons within black hole spin measurements from LIGO-Virgo's GWTC-2
Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.
This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.
SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event
T0 review · schema-true
One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.
pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp
abstract
Clouds of ultralight bosons - such as axions - can form around a rapidly spinning black hole, if the black hole radius is comparable to the bosons' wavelength. The cloud rapidly extracts angular momentum from the black hole, and reduces it to a characteristic value that depends on the boson's mass as well as on the black hole mass and spin. Therefore, a measurement of a black hole mass and spin can be used to reveal or exclude the existence of such bosons. Using the black holes released by LIGO and Virgo in their GWTC-2, we perform a simultaneous measurement of the black hole spin distribution at formation and the mass of the scalar boson. We find that the data strongly disfavors the existence of scalar bosons in the mass range between $1.3\times10^{-13}~\mathrm{eV}$ and $2.7\times10^{-13}~\mathrm{eV}$ for a decay constant $f_a\gtrsim 10^{14}~\mathrm{GeV}$. The statistical evidence is mostly driven by the two {binary black holes} systems GW190412 and GW190517, which host rapidly spinning black holes. The region where bosons are excluded narrows down if these two systems merged shortly ($\sim 10^5$ years) after the black holes formed.
Forward citations
Cited by 6 Pith papers
-
Perturbing Gravitational Atoms: Negative Love, Resonant Tides and Shifted Resonances
Spinning gravitational atoms have negative static Love numbers enhanced by O(10²–10³) over non-spinning clouds, with internal perturbations shifting binary resonances.
-
Trails of clouds in binary black holes
Boson clouds around binary black holes generically deplete through orbital resonances, driving eccentricity and spin-orbit tilt toward fixed points—including off-equatorial ones—leaving observable gravitational-wave trails.
-
Uncovering Hierarchical Sub-Population of Binary Black Holes
A flexible six-component fit to 259 LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA black-hole mergers finds a roughly geometric sequence of mass peaks but no aligned-spin signal except in the lowest-mass component.
-
Axiverse Lampposts
In a hierarchical multi-axion theory with random couplings, axion field ranges shrink with 1/sqrt(N), generic axion–SM couplings are suppressed, but the QCD axion's coupling is unsuppressed.
-
Ultralight Dark Matter from the Edge of Field Space
A scalar with hard field-space boundaries — a 'wallion' — is a viable ultralight dark-matter candidate whose exponentially small, radiatively stable mass and saturated relic density at large misalignment also suppress...
-
Search for continuous gravitational wave signals from luminous dark photon superradiance clouds with LVK O3 observations
A null search for continuous gravitational waves from 34 pulsar-like radio sources places upper limits on strain and disfavors dark photon masses around 10^-13 to 10^-12 eV with kinetic mixing 10^-9 to 10^-7, under sp...
Discussion (0). Continue with ORCID to comment.