Open AccessFinding the Ultralight Boson from a Black Hole’s Ringdown
Author(s) -
J. Gais,
Adrian Ka-Wai Chung,
Mark Ho-Yeuk Cheung,
Tjonnie G. F. Li
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
journal of physics. conference series
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.21
H-Index - 85
eISSN - 1742-6596
pISSN - 1742-6588
DOI - 10.1088/1742-6596/2156/1/012078
Subject(s) - physics , supermassive black hole , boson , black hole (networking) , astrophysics , scalar (mathematics) , gravitational wave , dark matter , solar mass , mass ratio , gravitation , particle physics , astronomy , galaxy , computer network , routing protocol , routing (electronic design automation) , geometry , mathematics , computer science , link state routing protocol
Solving the problem of dark matter remains one of the greatest unsolved mystery of fundamental physics. One possible dark matter candidate is the scalar ultralight boson, with mass « 1eV. If they exist, ultralight bosons will form clouds of significant total mass about rotating black holes, affecting the spacetime around the black hole. After the inspiral phase of a binary merger, the bosonic cloud can affect the perturbations to the black hole, resulting in deviations in the quasinormal mode frequencies of the ringdown signal of a binary merger. Here, we compute these shifts in the gravitational quasinormal mode frequencies for such a system, and conduct an injection campaign with supermassive black holes detected by the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna. We find that detections of the ringdown phase of supermassive black holes can rule out or confirm the existence of cloud-forming ultralight bosons of mass ∼ 10 −18 eV at redshift z > 1 if cloud dissipation effects during the inspiral can be neglected.