Black hole scalar sirens in the Milky Way

Abstract

Hypothetical light scalar particles trigger the superradiant instability around spinning black holes (BHs), causing clouds of scalars to grow around the BH. In the presence of sufficiently strong particle self-interactions (characterized by the decay constant $f$), scalars are ejected from BH orbits, resulting in coherent, non-relativistic emissions that continuously carry away the BH's angular momentum. Parameters exist for which cloud growth is much faster, and scalar depletion is much slower, than the age of the Galaxy. This defines a distinct class of astrophysical sources of scalars, which we call BH scalar sirens -- BHs that persistently emit scalars effectively forever. We compute the scalar background from the expected population of $N_\text{BH}\sim 10^{8}$ isolated stellar-mass BHs in the Milky Way, which are sirens for scalars in the mass range $10^{-13}$--$10^{-11}\,$eV and $f\lesssim 10^{14}$--$10^{9}\,$GeV. This provides a detection target independent of early-universe scalar production or cosmological initial conditions. The generated observable signals are up to two orders-of-magnitude larger than those expected from a misaligned cosmic scalar in this mass range. The energy spectrum of emitted scalars is distinctly broader and at higher velocities (up to $\sim 10^{-1}c$) than that of virialized dark matter, and encodes the mass and spin distributions of the BH population. While stellar-mass Milky Way BHs are our primary target, our framework extends to supermassive, intermediate-mass and light BHs. Given the difficulty of directly observing populations of isolated BHs, scalar emissions offer a novel probe of these otherwise invisible objects, highlighting the potential for joint discovery between scalars and BHs, and broadly motivating searches for scalars over many orders-of-magnitude in mass.