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Sharp Signals of Boson Clouds in Black Hole Binary Inspirals

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arxiv 2206.01212 v1 pith:OOI2WPGZ submitted 2022-06-02 gr-qc hep-phhep-th

Daniel Baumann , Gianfranco Bertone , John Stout , Giovanni Maria Tomaselli This is my paper · ORCID
classification gr-qchep-phhep-th
keywords bosoncloudbinaryblackholephysicscloudsgravitational
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Gravitational waves (GWs) are an exciting new probe of physics beyond the standard models of gravity and particle physics. One interesting possibility is provided by the so-called "gravitational atom," wherein a superradiant instability spontaneously forms a cloud of ultralight bosons around a rotating black hole. The presence of these boson clouds affects the dynamics of black hole binary inspirals and their associated GW signals. In this Letter, we show that the binary companion can induce transitions between bound and unbound states of the cloud, effectively "ionizing" it, analogous to the photoelectric effect in atomic physics. The orbital energy lost in this process can overwhelm the losses due to GW emission, so that ionization drives the inspiral rather than merely perturbing it. We show that the ionization power contains sharp features that lead to distinctive "kinks" in the evolution of the emitted GW frequency. These discontinuities are a unique signature of the boson cloud and observing them would not only constitute a detection of the ultralight boson itself, but also provide direct information about its mass and the state of the cloud.

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Cited by 9 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Ultralight Boson Ionization from Comparable-Mass Binaries

    gr-qc 2025-09 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    Ionization of boson molecules bound to a black hole binary can dominate gravitational-wave losses during early inspiral, imprinting a turnover in the nanohertz GW background and circularizing the orbit.

  2. Environmental effects in extreme mass ratio inspirals: perturbations to the environment in Kerr

    gr-qc 2025-01 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    A perturbative calculation shows that a secondary body in Kerr spacetime creates a wake in a superradiant scalar cloud, with energy fluxes that differ from Schwarzschild predictions by tens of percent.

  3. Scattering of wave dark matter by supermassive black holes

    gr-qc 2024-12 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    A first-principles scattering calculation explains the co-rotating wave dark matter profile around supermassive black hole binaries and predicts resonant power peaks that could imprint on the pulsar timing array spectrum.

  4. Stepping Up Superradiance Constraints on Axions

    hep-ph 2024-12 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    Including superradiant axion states through n=5 with relativistic scattering rates strengthens black-hole spin-down constraints on axions by roughly an order of magnitude.

  5. Relativistic Tidal Transitions of Saturated Kerr Boson Clouds

    astro-ph.GA 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Relativistic Kerr wavefunctions change tidal transition matrix elements of saturated boson clouds by up to 21.7% relative to the hydrogenic approximation, with the radial profile responsible for ~80% of the change.

  6. Extreme mass-ratio inspiral within an ultralight scalar cloud I. Scalar radiation

    gr-qc 2025-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Scalar radiation from an EMRI in an ultralight scalar cloud is computed semi-analytically, showing dipole clouds decelerate and quadrupole clouds accelerate the inspiral, with up to about 100 rad dephasing after 18 months.

  7. Search for continuous gravitational wave signals from luminous dark photon superradiance clouds with LVK O3 observations

    gr-qc 2025-01 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    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...

  8. Tidal Love numbers and quasi-normal modes of the Schwarzschild-Hernquist black hole

    gr-qc 2024-12 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    For a Schwarzschild black hole in a relativistic Hernquist dark matter halo, quasinormal-mode frequency shifts scale as (MDM/rs)^(3/2) rather than linearly, while tidal Love numbers are small and sensitive to the choi...

  9. On-shell approach to scalar hair in spinning binaries

    hep-th 2024-11 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Scalar hair on spinning compact objects is described by a conformal coupling of matter to a massless scalar, yielding matching waveforms and energy loss formulas for scalar-tensor gravity binaries.

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