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arXiv · 2107.05492

Searching for ultralight bosons with supermassive black hole ringdown

Adrian Ka-Wai Chung·Joseph Gais·Mark H. Y. Cheung·Tjonnie G. F. Li
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Abstract

One class of competitive candidates for dark matter is ultralight bosons. If they exist, these bosons may form long-lived bosonic clouds surrounding rotating black holes via superradiant instabilities, acting as sources of gravity and affecting the propagation of gravitational waves around the host black hole. During extreme-mass-ratio inspirals, the bosonic clouds will survive the inspiral phase and can affect the quasinormal-mode frequencies of the perturbed black-hole-bosonic-cloud system. In this work, we compute the shifts of gravitational quasinormal-mode frequencies of a rotating black hole due to the presence of a surrounding bosonic cloud. We then perform a mock analysis on simulated Laser Interferometer Space Antenna observational data containing injected ringdown signals from supermassive black holes with and without a bosonic cloud. We find that with less than an hour of observational data of the ringdown phase of nearby supermassive black holes such as Sagittarius A* and M32, we can rule out or confirm the existence of cloud-forming ultralight bosons of mass $ \sim 10^{-17} \rm eV$.

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Adrian Ka-Wai Chung, Joseph Gais, Mark H. Y. Cheung, Tjonnie G. F. Li. 2021-07-12. Searching for ultralight bosons with supermassive black hole ringdown. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevd.104.084028

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