Superradiance in massive vector fields with spatially varying mass

Abstract

Superradiance is a process by which massive bosonic particles can extract energy from spinning black holes, leading to the build up of a "cloud" if the particle has a Compton wavelength comparable to the black hole's Schwarzschild radius. One interesting possibility is that superradiance may occur for photons in a diffuse plasma, where they gain a small effective mass. Studies of the spin-0 case have indicated that such a build up is suppressed by a spatially varying effective mass, supposed to mimic the photons' interaction with a physically realistic plasma density profile. We carry out relativistic simulations of a massive Proca field evolving on a Kerr background, with modifications to account for the spatially varying effective mass. This allows us to treat the spin-1 case directly relevant to photons, and to study the effect of thinner disk profiles in the plasma. We find similar qualitative results to the scalar case, and so support the conclusions of that work: either a constant asymptotic mass or a shell-like plasma structure is required for superradiant growth to occur. We study thin disks and find a leakage of the superradiant cloud that suppresses its growth, concluding that thick disks are more likely to support the instability.

13 pages, 9 figures, 2 tables

References in corpus (14)

• A bright millisecond radio burst of extragalactic origin
• 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
• Superradiant instabilities in astrophysical systems
• Stochastic and resolvable gravitational waves from ultralight bosons
• Bosenova collapse of axion cloud around a rotating black hole
• The Kerr spacetime: A brief introduction
• Gravitational wave signatures of ultralight vector bosons from black hole superradiance
• Constraints on ultralight scalar bosons within black hole spin measurements from LIGO-Virgo's GWTC-2
• GRChombo: An adaptable numerical relativity code for fundamental physics
• Probing the string axiverse by gravitational waves from Cygnus X-1
• Quantum Bound States Around Black Holes

Cited by in corpus (9)

• The problem with Proca: ghost instabilities in self-interacting vector fields
• A singularity problem for interacting massive vectors
• Self-Interacting Gravitational Atoms in the Strong-Gravity Regime
• Superradiance in Stars: Non-equilibrium approach to damping of fields in stellar media
• Dark photon superradiance quenched by dark matter
• Quasibound state reminiscent in de-Sitter black holes: Quasinormal modes and the decay of massive fields
• Superradiant instabilities by accretion disks in scalar-tensor theories
• Impact of the cosmic neutrino background on black hole superradiance
• Internal symmetry to the rescue: well-posed 1+1 evolution of self-interacting vector fields