Gravitational wave signatures of ultralight vector bosons from black hole superradiance

Abstract

In the presence of an ultralight bosonic field, spinning black holes are unstable to superradiance. The rotational energy of the black hole is converted into a non-axisymmetric, oscillating boson cloud which dissipates through the emission of nearly monochromatic gravitational radiation. Thus, gravitational wave observations by ground- or space-based detectors can be used to probe the existence of dark particles weakly coupled to the Standard Model. In this work, we focus on massive vector bosons, which grow much faster through superradiance, and produce significantly stronger gravitational waves compared to the scalar case. We use techniques from black hole perturbation theory to compute the relativistically-correct gravitational wave signal across the parameter space of different boson masses and black hole masses and spins. This fills in a gap in the literature between flatspace approximations, which underestimate the gravitational wave amplitude in the non-relativistic limit, and overestimate it in the relativistic regime, and time-domain calculations, which have only covered a limited part of the parameter space. We also identify parameter ranges where overtone superradiantly unstable modes will grow faster than the lower frequency fundamental modes. Such cases will produce a distinct gravitational wave signal due to the beating of the simultaneously populated modes, which we compute.

18 pages, 11 figures; updated to match PRD version

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Cited by in corpus (7)

• Constraints on ultralight scalar bosons within black hole spin measurements from LIGO-Virgo's GWTC-2
• Black holes with synchronised Proca hair: linear clouds and fundamental non-linear solutions
• Searching for ultralight bosons with supermassive black hole ringdown
• Superradiant instabilities of massive bosons around exotic compact objects
• On the Interaction between Ultralight Bosons and Quantum-Corrected Black Holes
• Probing Particle Physics with Gravitational Waves
• Ultralight bosonic dark matter in white dwarfs and potential observational consequences