Departmental Seminar

Searching for gravitational waves from ultralight vector boson clouds

Ms Dana Jones

Ultralight bosons are predicted in many extensions to the Standard Model and are popular dark matter candidates. The black hole superradiance mechanism allows for these particles to be probed using only their gravitational interaction. In this scenario, an ultralight boson cloud may form spontaneously around a spinning black hole and extract a non-negligible fraction of the black hole’s mass. These oscillating clouds produce quasi-monochromatic, long-duration gravitational waves that may be detectable by ground-based or space-based gravitational wave detectors. In this talk, I will discuss the capability of a new, long-duration signal tracking method, based on a hidden Markov model, to detect gravitational-wave signals generated by ultralight vector boson clouds. I will outline the detection prospects for vector boson clouds with current- and next-generation ground-based detectors, demonstrating that vector clouds hosted by black holes with mass ≳ 60 M and spin ≳ 0.6 are within the reach of current-generation detectors up to a luminosity distance of ~1 Gpc. Based on these sensitivity estimates, I will describe a promising search target for vector boson signals—compact binary merger remnant black holes—and discuss how various data quality issues might impact the searches. I will also explain how we incorporate uncertainties in the source parameters when inferring constraints on the boson mass.

Date & time

Wed 29 May 2024, 9–10am

Location

Room:

Physics Studio

Audience

Members of RSPE welcome