Directed searches for gravitational waves from ultralight bosons

Isi, M.; Sun, L.; Brito, Richard; Melatos, A.

doi:10.1103/physrevd.99.084042

Cited by 101 publications

(105 citation statements)

References 120 publications

(335 reference statements)

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“…Our results can be used in searches for the GW sig-nals from ultralight vector boson clouds around spinning BHs, which could fall into several different categories. First, targeted searches can be used to follow-up detections of compact binary mergers where the remnant is a spinning BH [46,47]. Using the measured properties of the BH, these results can be used to predict the possible signals for different putative boson masses.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gravitational wave signatures of ultralight vector bosons from black hole superradiance

Siemonsen

East

2020

Phys. Rev. D

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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 holes 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.1 An even set of minimally coupled bosonic fields can be arranged to form an axisymmetric energy-momentum distribution, and hence a stationary hairy BH at the saturation point of the insta-arXiv:1910.09476v1 [gr-qc]

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gravitational wave signatures of ultralight vector bosons from black hole superradiance

Siemonsen

East

2020

Phys. Rev. D

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“…A search for a stochastic GW background from boson clouds in the first aLIGO observing run excluded a mass range of 2.0 ≤ µ/(10 −13 eV) ≤ 3.8 at 95% credibility, under optimistic assumptions about BH populations [19]. Methods have been developed to search for continuous GWs from individual clouds, with and without restrictions to specific sky locations [20,21]. Constraints on the boson mass (µ ∼ 10 −13 eV) have been suggested using pre-existing strain upper limits for continuous GWs obtained from undirected searches [22,23].…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Like for the stochastic background, such constraints are contingent on BH populations. Isi et al [21] modeled the signal waveforms for individual sources with a known sky location, and demonstrated the suitability of a specific search algorithm based on a hidden Markov model (HMM) to efficiently search for such signals [21,[24][25][26]. Two primary types of sources are of interests for such directed searches: remnants from compact binary coalescences (CBCs) [27], and known BHs in X-ray binaries [11,28,29].…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Two primary types of sources are of interests for such directed searches: remnants from compact binary coalescences (CBCs) [27], and known BHs in X-ray binaries [11,28,29]. Detection prospects for CBC remnants are hurt by their typically large luminosity distances, most likely demanding third-generation detectors [21,[30][31][32][33][34]. On the other hand, X-ray binaries have the advantages of being much closer and better localized, hence potentially lying within the sensitive range of existing detectors.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Method and setup.-The semi-coherent search is based on a HMM tracking scheme combined with a frequency domain matched filter, Bessel-weighted Fstatistic [21,24,25] (see Supplement). The total observing time T obs is divided into shorter intervals with duration T coh , over which the signal power is collected coherently.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Search for ultralight bosons in Cygnus X-1 with Advanced LIGO

2020

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Ultralight scalars, if they exist as theorized, could form clouds around rapidly rotating black holes. Such clouds are expected to emit continuous, quasimonochromatic gravitational waves that could be detected by LIGO and Virgo. Here we present results of a directed search for such signals from the Cygnus X-1 binary, using data from Advanced LIGO's second observing run. We find no evidence of gravitational waves in the 250-750 Hz band. Without incorporating existing measurements of the Cygnus X-1 black hole spin, our results disfavor boson masses in 5.8 ≤ µ/(10 −13 eV) ≤ 8.6, assuming that the black hole was born 5 × 10 6 years ago with a nearly-extremal spin. We then focus on a string axiverse scenario, in which self-interactions enable a cloud for high black-hole spins consistent with measurements for Cygnus X-1. In that model, we constrain the boson masses in 9.6 ≤ µ/(10 −13 eV) ≤ 15.5 for a decay constant fa ∼ 10 15 GeV. Future application of our methods to other sources will yield improved constraints.Introduction.-Ultralight scalar (spin 0) or vector (spin 1) boson particles have been theorized under several frameworks to solve problems in particle physics, high-energy theory and cosmology [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]. If such a new fundamental field exists, its occupancy number should superradiantly grow around fast-spinning black holes (BHs). This occurs when ω µ /m < Ω BH , where ω µ = µ/ is the characteristic angular frequency of a boson with rest energy µ, m is the boson azimuthal quantum number with respect to the BH's rotation axis, and Ω BH is the angular speed of the outer horizon. The superradiant instability is maximized when the Compton wavelength of the particle is comparable to the characteristic length of the BH, meaning hc/µ ∼ GM/c 2 . If these conditions are satisfied, the number of ultralight bosons around the BH grows exponentially, forming a macroscopic cloud holding up to ∼10% of the BH mass. This cloud can have a long lifetime, during which it generates continuous, quasi-monochromatic gravitational waves (GWs) [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16].

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