Stochastic and resolvable gravitational waves from ultralight bosons

Abstract

Ultralight scalar fields around spinning black holes can trigger superradiant instabilities, forming a long-lived bosonic condensate outside the horizon. We use numerical solutions of the perturbed field equations and astrophysical models of massive and stellar-mass black hole populations to compute, for the first time, the stochastic gravitational-wave background from these sources. In optimistic scenarios the background is observable by Advanced LIGO and LISA for field masses $m_s$ in the range $\sim [2\times 10^{-13},10^{-12}]\mathrm{eV}$ and $\sim 5\times [10^{-19},10^{-16}]\mathrm{eV}$, respectively, and it can affect the detectability of resolvable sources. Our estimates suggest that an analysis of the stochastic background limits from LIGO O1 might already be used to marginally exclude axions with mass $\sim 10^{-12.5}\mathrm{eV}$. Semicoherent searches with Advanced LIGO (LISA) should detect $\sim 15(5)$ to $200(40)$ resolvable sources for scalar field masses $3\times 10^{-13}$ ($10^{-17}$) eV. LISA measurements of massive BH spins could either rule out bosons in the range $\sim [10^{-18},2\times 10^{-13}]$ eV, or measure $m_s$ with ten percent accuracy in the range $\sim [10^{-17},10^{-13}]$ eV.

6 pages, 4 Figures; v2: small changes to match version published in Physical Review Letters

References in corpus (13)

• Advanced LIGO
• Ultralight scalars as cosmological dark matter
• Laser Interferometer Space Antenna
• Discovering the QCD Axion with Black Holes and Gravitational Waves
• Instability of the massive Klein-Gordon field on the Kerr spacetime
• The Effect of Pair-Instability Mass Loss on Black Hole Mergers
• Black holes as particle detectors: evolution of superradiant instabilities
• Rotational mixing in massive binaries: detached short-period systems
• Superradiant instabilities in astrophysical systems
• On the Lack of Evolution in Galaxy Star Formation Efficiency
• The Impact of Star Formation and Gamma-Ray Burst Rates at High Redshift on Cosmic Chemical Evolution and Reionization
• The imprint of massive black-hole mergers on the correlation between nuclear clusters and their host galaxies
• Probing the string axiverse by gravitational waves from Cygnus X-1

Cited by in corpus (23)

• The TianQin project: current progress on science and technology
• Exploring the sensitivity of gravitational wave detectors to neutron star physics
• Recent searches for continuous gravitational waves
• Ultralight boson cloud depletion in binary systems
• Gravitational wave signatures of ultralight vector bosons from black hole superradiance
• A first search for a stochastic gravitational-wave background from ultralight bosons
• Constraints on ultralight scalar bosons within black hole spin measurements from LIGO-Virgo's GWTC-2
• Tidal deformability of dressed black holes and tests of ultralight bosons in extended mass ranges
• Search methods for continuous gravitational-wave signals from unknown sources in the advanced-detector era
• Axion dark matter search using arm cavity transmitted beams of gravitational wave detectors
• Effective field theory for black holes with induced scalar charges
• Forecasts for Low Spin Black Hole Spectroscopy in Horndeski Gravity
• Scalar field dark matter with a cosh potential, revisited
• Superradiant instabilities of massive bosons around exotic compact objects
• Wormholes and masses for Goldstone bosons
• On the Interaction between Ultralight Bosons and Quantum-Corrected Black Holes
• Probing Particle Physics with Gravitational Waves
• Binary superradiance: a numerical study
• How do scalar-field dark matter haloes react to orbiting bodies?
• Co-interacting dark matter and conformally coupled light scalars
• Space-based Gravitational Wave Observatories
• Dynamical Chameleon Neutron Stars: stability, radial oscillations and scalar radiation in spherical symmetry
• Reissner-Nordström black holes in de Sitter space-time: bounds with quasinormal frequencies