Constraints on Ultralight Scalar Bosons within Black Hole Spin Measurements from the LIGO-Virgo GWTC-2
Name
PhysRevLett.126.151102.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
362.69 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
68d3b5dc1846e0bdec98ece4ec2673bd
Author(s)
Ng, Ken KY
Vitale, Salvatore
Hannuksela, Otto A
Li, Tjonnie GF
Date Issued
2021
Journal
Physical Review Letters
Publisher
American Physical Society (APS)
Citation
Ng, Ken KY, Vitale, Salvatore, Hannuksela, Otto A and Li, Tjonnie GF. 2021. "Constraints on Ultralight Scalar Bosons within Black Hole Spin Measurements from the LIGO-Virgo GWTC-2." Physical Review Letters, 126 (15).
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Clouds of ultralight bosons-such as axions-can form around a rapidly spinning black hole, if the black hole radius is comparable to the bosons' wavelength. The cloud rapidly extracts angular momentum from the black hole, and reduces it to a characteristic value that depends on the boson's mass as well as on the black hole mass and spin. Therefore, a measurement of a black hole mass and spin can be used to reveal or exclude the existence of such bosons. Using the black holes released by LIGO and Virgo in their GWTC-2, we perform a simultaneous measurement of the black hole spin distribution at formation and the mass of the scalar boson. We find that the data strongly disfavor the existence of scalar bosons in the mass range between 1.3×10^{-13} and 2.7×10^{-13} eV. Our mass constraint is valid for bosons with negligible self-interaction, that is, with a decay constant f_{a}≳10^{14} GeV. The statistical evidence is mostly driven by the two binary black holes systems GW190412 and GW190517, which host rapidly spinning black holes. The region where bosons are excluded narrows down if these two systems merged shortly (∼10^{5} yr) after the black holes formed.
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/PHYSREVLETT.126.151102
