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Ionization of Gravitational Atoms

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arxiv 2112.14777 v2 pith:EWYQ6H4Y submitted 2021-12-29 gr-qc hep-phhep-th

Ionization of Gravitational Atoms

classification gr-qc hep-phhep-th
keywords gravitationalcompanionatomsbinarycloudionizationaccretionblack
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Superradiant instabilities may create clouds of ultralight bosons around rotating black holes, forming so-called "gravitational atoms." It was recently shown that the presence of a binary companion can induce resonant transitions between bound states of these clouds, whose backreaction on the binary's orbit leads to characteristic signatures in the emitted gravitational waves. In this work, we show that the interaction with the companion can also trigger transitions from bound to unbound states of the cloud -- a process that we refer to as "ionization" in analogy with the photoelectric effect in atomic physics. The orbital energy lost in the process overwhelms the losses due to gravitational wave emission and contains sharp features carrying information about the energy spectrum of the cloud. Moreover, we also show that if the companion is a black hole, then the part of the cloud impinging on the event horizon will be absorbed. This "accretion" leads to a significant increase of the companion's mass, which alters the dynamical evolution and ensuing waveform of the binary. We argue that a combined treatment of resonances, ionization, and accretion is crucial to discover and characterize gravitational atoms with upcoming gravitational wave detectors.

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Cited by 9 Pith papers

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