Ultralight scalars and resonances in black-hole physics

Abstract

Ultralight degrees of freedom coupled to matter lead to resonances, which can be excited when the Compton wavelength of the field equals a dynamical scale in the problem. For binaries composed of a star orbiting a supermassive black hole, these resonances lead to a smoking-gun effect: a periastron distance which {\it stalls}, even in the presence of gravitational-wave dissipation. This effect, also called a {\it floating orbit}, occurs for generic equatorial but eccentric orbits and we argue that finite-size effects are not enough to suppress it.

10 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (3)

• Osculating orbits in Schwarzschild spacetime, with an application to extreme mass-ratio inspirals
• An Efficient Numerical Method for Computing Gravitational Waves Induced by a Particle Moving on Eccentric Inclined Orbits around a Kerr Black Hole
• Calculation of radiation reaction effect on orbital parameters in Kerr spacetime

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• Dark Matter reconstruction from stellar orbits in the Galactic Centre