SearcharxivSearch

arXiv · 2305.05691

Extreme-mass-ratio inspirals into rotating boson stars: nonintegrability, chaos, and transient resonances

Abstract

General relativity predicts that black holes are described by the Kerr metric, which has integrable geodesics. This property is crucial to produce accurate waveforms from extreme-mass-ratio inspirals. Astrophysical environments, modifications of gravity and new fundamental fields may lead to nonintegrable geodesics, inducing chaotic effects. We study geodesics around self-interacting rotating boson stars and find robust evidence of nonintegrability and chaos. We identify islands of stability around resonant orbits, where the orbital radial and polar oscillation frequency ratios, known as rotation numbers, remain constant throughout the island. These islands are generically present both in the exterior and the interior of compact boson stars. A monotonicity change of rotation curves takes place as orbits travel from the exterior to the interior of the star. Therefore, configurations with neutron-star-like compactness can support degenerate resonant islands. This anomaly is reported here for the first time and it is not present in black holes. Such configurations can also support extremely prolonged resonant islands that span from the exterior to the interior of the star and are shielded by thick chaotic layers. We adiabatically evolve inspirals using approximated post-Newtonian fluxes and find time-dependent plateaus in the rotation curves which are associated with island-crossing orbits. Crossings of external islands give rise to typical gravitational-wave glitches found in non-Kerr objects. Furthermore, when an inspiral is traversing an internal island that is surrounded by a thick chaotic layer, a new type of simultaneous multifrequency glitch occurs that may be detectable with space interferometers such as LISA, and can serve as evidence of an extreme-mass-ratio inspiral around a supermassive boson star.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Kyriakos Destounis, Federico Angeloni, Massimo Vaglio, Paolo Pani. 2023-05-09. Extreme-mass-ratio inspirals into rotating boson stars: nonintegrability, chaos, and transient resonances. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevd.108.084062

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

Electrovacuum Black Hole Uniqueness

We prove the black hole uniqueness conjecture in the axially symmetric, stationary, electrovacuum setting, subject to the refined asymptotic analysis of the associated singular harmonic maps, which includes an analyticity hypothesis at the axes. More precisely, it is shown that any asymptotically flat solution of the Einstein--Maxwell equations in this class, with more than one black hole horizon component is either: Majumdar--Papapetrou, up to a duality rotation, in which case all logarithmic angle defects vanish, or every finite axis rod logarithmic angle defect is strictly negative and hence every interaction force is strictly attractive. The proof extends the singular harmonic map method used for vacuum Kerr uniqueness in [18].

gr-qc

Constraining Modified Mass-to-Horizon Cosmology Through Primordial Inflationary Observables

We investigate slow-roll inflation in a modified cosmological framework inspired by a generalized mass-to-horizon relation (MHR), $M=\gamma {c^2 L^n}/{G}$, where $n$ is a real parameter and $\gamma$ a dimensional constant. Using Padmanabhan's emergence paradigm, we derive the modified Friedmann equations for a flat FRW universe and analyze the dynamics of a canonical scalar field (inflaton) under the slow-roll approximation. We study the resulting inflationary phenomenology for power-law and Starobinsky potentials. For power-law potentials, the MHR modification fails to reconcile these models with current CMB constraints on $r$ and $n_s$. In contrast, Starobinsky inflation exhibits significant sensitivity to deviations from $n=1$. A perturbative analysis ($n=1+\Delta$) yields corrections to inflationary observables. We observe that the scalar power-spectrum normalization, under a fixed-Starobinsky prescription, imposes the stringent constraint $0.960 \lesssim n \lesssim 1.040$ for $N=60$ efolds. This is considerably tighter than spectral-index bounds. Our results establish inflation, particularly Starobinsky-like models, as a sensitive probe of generalized horizon thermodynamics and departures from standard MHR scaling.

gr-qc

Improving the Sensitivity of Gravitational Wave Detection with Weighted Conformal Prediction

In the last decade, kilometre-scale interferometric gravitational-wave detectors have observed hundreds of compact binary mergers, the majority of which are binary black holes. However, the data are noise-dominated, and multiple independent search algorithms (pipelines) are used to enhance sensitivity and improve robustness. Rather than the standard approach of selecting the most significant pipeline output, we combine the outputs from all pipelines using a conformal prediction-based framework to provide statistically rigorous confidence estimates for candidate events. While combining pipelines improves sensitivity and ranking robustness, it requires a principled statistical framework that remains valid as data properties evolve across observing runs. A key challenge is distribution shifts between simulated datasets used for training and calibration and the real, unlabelled, observations used for testing, which can invalidate coverage guarantees and bias confidence estimates. In this work, we address this challenge by incorporating likelihood-ratio reweighting into our conformal prediction framework to account for covariate shift. Using mock datasets containing simulated signals, we demonstrate that weighted conformal prediction restores well-calibrated coverage under covariate shift and increases the confidence of events near the detection threshold, recovering true signals that would otherwise be missed.

gr-qc