Axion clouds may survive the perturbative tidal interaction over the early inspiral phase of black hole binaries

Abstract

Gravitational wave observation has the potential of probing ultralight bosonic fields such as axion. Axion forms a cloud around a rotating black hole (BH) by superradiant instability and should affect the gravitational waveform from binary BHs. On the other hand, considering the cloud associated with a BH in a binary system, tidal interaction depletes the cloud in some cases during the inspiral phase. We made the exhaustive study of cloud depletion numerically in a wide parameter range for equal mass binaries, assuming only the quadrupolar tidal perturbation is at work. We found that clouds can avoid disappearing due to the tidal effect only when $l=1$ mode is the fastest growing mode and when the binary orbit is counter-rotating in the non-relativistic parameter region.

15 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Discovering the QCD Axion with Black Holes and Gravitational Waves
• Instability of the massive Klein-Gordon field on the Kerr spacetime
• Gravitational wave searches for ultralight bosons with LIGO and LISA
• Black holes as particle detectors: evolution of superradiant instabilities
• Ultralight boson cloud depletion in binary systems

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Tidal deformability of dressed black holes and tests of ultralight bosons in extended mass ranges
• Axion cloud evaporation during inspiral of black hole binaries -- the effects of backreaction and radiation
• Evolution of binary systems accompanying axion clouds in extreme mass ratio inspirals