Searching for ultralight bosons with supermassive black hole ringdown

Chung, A. K. W.; Gais, J.; Cheung, Mark Ho-Yeuk; Li, Tjonnie G. F.

doi:10.1103/physrevd.104.084028

Cited by 19 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 92 publications

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“…In particular, the fundamental QNM frequency can have corrections of order one when a tiny perturbation is added to the potential [22]. Physical perturbations of the potential can have various origins, including nonlinear effects within vacuum GR [23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30], ordinary matter [31][32][33], dark matter [34], or modifications of Einstein's theory of gravity [35,36]. In this paper we address an important question: could this instability affect our ability to do BH spectroscopy with gravitational-wave observations?…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Stability of the Fundamental Quasinormal Mode in Time-Domain Observations: The Elephant and the Flea Redux

Berti,

Cardoso,

Cheung

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Black hole spectroscopy with gravitational waves is an important tool to measure the mass and spin of astrophysical black holes and to test their Kerr nature. Next-generation ground-and spacebased detectors will observe binary black hole mergers with large signal-to-noise ratios and perform spectroscopy routinely. It was recently shown that small perturbations due, e.g., to environmental effects (the "flea") to the effective potential governing gravitational-wave generation and propagation in black hole exteriors (the "elephant") can lead to arbitrarily large changes in the black hole's quasinormal spectrum, including the fundamental mode, which is expected to dominate the observed signal. This raises an important question: is the black hole spectroscopy program robust against perturbations? We clarify the physical behavior of time-domain signals under small perturbations in the potential, and we show that changes in the amplitude of the fundamental mode in the prompt ringdown signal are parametrically small. This implies that the fundamental quasinormal mode extracted from the observable time-domain signal is stable against small perturbations. The stability of overtones deserves further investigation.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Stability of the Fundamental Quasinormal Mode in Time-Domain Observations: The Elephant and the Flea Redux

Berti,

Cardoso,

Cheung

et al. 2022

Preprint

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“…with 1 and V bump a generic bump located at r * = a, such that V bump goes to zero as r * → ±∞ at least as fast as V . Such a bump could be introduced by matter surrounding the BH (see [49] or Supplemental Material for explicit examples). We are interested in the complex QNM frequencies ω…”

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confidence: 99%

Destabilizing the Fundamental Mode of Black Holes: The Elephant and the Flea

et al. 2022

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Recent work applying the notion of pseudospectrum to gravitational physics showed that the quasinormal mode spectrum of black holes is unstable, with the possible exception of the longest-lived (fundamental) mode. The fundamental mode dominates the expected signal in gravitational wave astronomy, and there is no reason why it should have privileged status. We compute the quasinormal mode spectrum of two model problems where the Schwarzschild potential is perturbed by a small "bump" consisting of either a Pöschl-Teller potential or a Gaussian, and we show that the fundamental mode is destabilized under generic perturbations. We present phase diagrams and study a simple double-barrier toy problem to clarify the conditions under which the spectral instability occurs. Introduction.The advent of gravitational-wave (GW) astronomy [1, 2] and of very long baseline interferometry [3,4] opened exciting new windows to the invisible Universe. Black holes (BHs) play a unique role in the endeavor to test our understanding of general relativity (GR) and in the search for new physics [5][6][7][8][9][10][11].According to the singularity theorems [12,13], classical GR must fail in BH interiors. Quantum mechanics in BH spacetimes also leads to puzzling consequences, such as the information paradox [14][15][16]. It is tempting to conjecture that a theory of quantum gravity will resolve these issues, but the scale and nature of quantum gravity corrections to BH spacetimes is unknown. Uniqueness results in vacuum GR imply that BHs are the simplest macroscopic objects in the Universe [17], and BHs do not "polarize" in binary systems [18][19][20][21][22][23]. The simplicity of BHs (whether isolated or in binaries) implies that they are ideal laboratories to probe the limitations of GR, as long as environmental effects or astrophysical uncertainties can be ignored. In this Letter we ask an important question: is it really possible to ignore environmental effects?One of the tools to test the Kerr geometry is BH spectroscopy [24-26], now a thriving field [27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34]. If a compact binary merger leads to the formation of a rotating BH, as predicted in GR, the spacetime should asymptote to the Kerr metric through a relaxation process during which it can be described as a perturbation of the Kerr metric. The late-time GW signal (the "ringdown") is a superposition of damped exponentials with complex frequencies known as the quasinormal modes (QNMs), which can be computed within perturbation theory as poles of the associated Green's function [35][36][37]. The residues corresponding to these poles in the complex frequency plane dictate the amplitude of the response. To model a ringdown signal using Kerr QNM frequencies in vacuum, we should take into account the surrounding matter (even if it can be considered as a small perturbation). This is the

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“…However, others [12] states the corrections of DM halos to the GW signal or environment effects are negligible. Later, the related studies [13][14][15][16][17] continue and support the claim that phases of GW can be modified to have impacts on future space-borne GW experiments. Extensions to different DM candidates [18][19][20][21] and discussions of backreaction [16,22,23] have also been explored.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 84%

Probing Dark Matter Spikes via Gravitational Waves of Extreme Mass Ratio Inspirals

Li,

Tang,

2021

Preprint

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The exact properties of dark matter remain largely unknown despite of the accumulating evidence. If dark matter is composed of weakly-interacting massive particles, it would be accreted by the black hole in galactic center and forms a dense cuspy spike. Dynamical friction from such a spike may have observable effects in a binary system. We consider extreme-mass-ratio inspiral (EMRI) binaries consisting of massive black holes harbored in dark matter spikes and stellar mass objects in elliptic orbits. We find the gravitational-wave waveforms in frequency domain can be significantly modified.In particular, we show dark matter can suppress the characteristic strain of gravitational wave at low frequency but enhance it at higher domain. These effects are more dramatic as the dark matter density increases. The results indicate that the signal-to-noise ratio of EMRIs could be strongly reduced around 10 −3 ∼ 0.3 Hz but enhanced around 1.0 Hz with a higher sensitivity, which could be probed via future space-borne GW detectors, LISA and TAIJI. The findings would have important impacts on the detection and parameter inference of EMRIs.

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Searching for ultralight bosons with supermassive black hole ringdown

Cited by 19 publications

References 92 publications

Stability of the Fundamental Quasinormal Mode in Time-Domain Observations: The Elephant and the Flea Redux

Stability of the Fundamental Quasinormal Mode in Time-Domain Observations: The Elephant and the Flea Redux

Destabilizing the Fundamental Mode of Black Holes: The Elephant and the Flea

Probing Dark Matter Spikes via Gravitational Waves of Extreme Mass Ratio Inspirals

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