Description
One of the greatest mysteries in modern physics is the nature of dark matter, which makes up most of the matter in the universe but has never been directly observed. Among the most intriguing candidates are ultralight bosons, hypothetical particles predicted in many extensions of the Standard Model of particle physics. These particles would interact extremely weakly with ordinary matter, making them nearly impossible to detect in terrestrial experiments. Remarkably, black holes offer a unique laboratory to search for such particles.
If ultralight bosons exist, they can extract rotational energy from a spinning black hole through the process of superradiance, forming a boson cloud around the black hole. This phenomenon gives rise to two complementary observational signatures that can be explored using gravitational-wave observations. The boson cloud can emit long-duration gravitational waves, while the extraction of angular momentum spins the black hole down, leaving characteristic imprints on the spins of merging black holes.
In this talk, I will present two complementary approaches for probing ultralight bosons with gravitational-wave observations from the LIGO–Virgo–KAGRA detector network. The first is a directed search for long-duration gravitational-wave signals from vector boson clouds surrounding newly formed merger-remnant black holes. The second uses measurements of the spins of black holes in binary mergers to constrain both scalar and vector bosons through the absence of superradiance-induced spin-down. Together, these methods provide independent and complementary probes of the same underlying physics: one searches directly for gravitational-wave emission from boson clouds, while the other uses the observed properties of black holes to test for the effects of superradiance.
This work highlights the potential of gravitational-wave astronomy as a powerful tool for exploring physics beyond the Standard Model, opening new avenues for searching for dark matter candidates and other fundamental particles that are difficult to access through conventional laboratory experiments.
| I am the presenting author | Yes |
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