Searching for ultralight bosons within spin measurements of a population of binary black hole mergers
Name
PhysRevD.103.063010.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
540.63 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
e496d7c24bad87e19549395714306ac6
Author(s)
Ng, Ken KY
Hannuksela, Otto A
Vitale, Salvatore
Li, Tjonnie GF
Date Issued
2021
Journal
Physical Review D
Publisher
American Physical Society (APS)
Citation
Ng, Ken KY, Hannuksela, Otto A, Vitale, Salvatore and Li, Tjonnie GF. 2021. "Searching for ultralight bosons within spin measurements of a population of binary black hole mergers." Physical Review D, 103 (6).
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Ultralight bosons can form clouds around rotating black holes if their
Compton wavelength is comparable to the black hole size. The boson cloud spins
down the black hole through a process called superradiance, lowering the black
hole spin to a characteristic value. It has been suggested that spin
measurements of the black holes detected by ground-based gravitational-wave
detectors can be used to constrain the mass of ultralight bosons.
Unfortunately, a measurement of the individual black hole spins is often
uncertain, resulting in inconclusive results. Instead, we use hierarchical
Bayesian inference to combine information from multiple gravitational-wave
sources and obtain stronger constraints. We show that hundreds of high
signal-to-noise ratio gravitational-wave detections are enough to exclude
(confirm) the existence of non-interacting bosons in the mass range
$\left[10^{-13},3\times 10^{-12}\right]~\rm{eV}$
$\left([10^{-13},10^{-12}]~\rm{eV}\right)$. The precise number depends on the
distribution of black hole spins at formation and the mass of the boson. From
the few uninformative spin measurements of binary black hole mergers detected
by LIGO and Virgo in their first two observing runs, we cannot draw
statistically significant conclusions.
MIT Department
LIGO (Observatory : Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1103/PHYSREVD.103.063010
