Tidal heating as a discriminator for horizons in extreme mass ratio inspirals

Abstract

The defining feature of a classical black hole is being a perfect absorber. Any evidence showing otherwise would indicate a departure from the standard black-hole picture. Energy and angular momentum absorption by the horizon of a black hole is responsible for tidal heating in a binary. This effect is particularly important in the latest stages of an extreme mass ratio inspiral around a spinning supermassive object, one of the main targets of the future LISA mission. We study how this effect can be used to probe the nature of supermassive objects in a model independent way. We compute the orbital dephasing and the gravitational-wave signal emitted by a point particle in circular, equatorial motion around a spinning supermassive object to the leading order in the mass ratio. Absence of absorption by the central object can affect the gravitational-wave signal dramatically, especially at high spin. This effect will make it possible to put an unparalleled upper bound on the reflectivity of exotic compact objects, at the level of $\mathcal{O}(0.01)\%$. This stringent bound would exclude the possibility of observing echoes in the ringdown of a supermassive binary merger.

v2: 8+4 pages, 5 figures, one new plot. Version to appear in PRD

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Cited by in corpus (8)

• Modeling horizon absorption in spinning binary black holes using effective worldline theory
• Oscillations in the EMRI gravitational wave phase correction as a probe of reflective boundary of the central black hole
• Asymptotically de-Sitter black holes have non-zero tidal Love numbers
• Modeling gravitational waves from exotic compact objects
• Divergences in gravitational-wave emission and absorption from extreme mass ratio binaries
• On the Interaction between Ultralight Bosons and Quantum-Corrected Black Holes
• Gravitational-wave echoes from spinning exotic compact objects: numerical waveforms from the Teukolsky equation
• Resonances, black hole mimickers and the greenhouse effect: consequences for gravitational-wave physics