Extracting ultralight boson properties from boson clouds around post-merger remnants

Abstract

Ultralight bosons are a class of hypothetical particles that could potentially solve critical problems in fields ranging from cosmology to astrophysics and fundamental physics. If ultralight bosons exist, they form clouds around spinning black holes with sizes comparable to their particle Compton wavelength through superradiance, a well-understood classical wave amplification process that has been studied for decades. After these clouds form, they dissipate and emit continuous gravitational waves through the annihilation of ultralight bosons into gravitons. These gravitons could be detected with ground-based gravitational-wave detectors using continuous-wave searches. However, it is conceivable for other continuous-wave sources to mimic the emission from the clouds, which could lead to false detections. Here we investigate how one can use continuous waves from clouds formed around known merger remnants to alleviate this problem. In particular, we simulate a catalogue of merger remnants that form clouds around them and demonstrate with select "golden" merger remnants how one can perform a Bayesian cross-verification of the ultralight boson hypothesis that has the potential to rule out alternative explanations. Our proof-of-concept study suggest that, in the future, there is a possibility that a merger remnant exists close enough for us to perform the analysis and test the boson hypothesis if the bosons exist in the relevant mass range. Future research will focus on building more sophisticated continuous-wave tools to perform this analysis in practice.