Black hole superradiance is a powerful probe of light, weakly-coupled hidden sector particles. Many candidate particles, such as axions, generically have self-interactions that can influence the evolution of the superradiant instability. As pointed out in arXiv:1604.06422 in the context of a toy model, much of the existing literature on spin-0 superradiance does not take into account the most important self-interaction-induced processes. These processes lead to energy exchange between quasi-bound levels and particle emission to infinity; for large self-couplings, superradiant growth is saturated at a quasi-equilibrium configuration of reduced level occupation numbers. In this paper, we perform a detailed analysis of the rich dynamics of spin-0 superradiance with self-interactions, and the resulting observational signatures. We focus on quartic self-interactions, which dominate the evolution for most models of interest. We explore multiple distinct regimes of parameter space introduced by a non-zero self-interaction, including the simultaneous population of two or more bound levels; at large coupling, we confirm the basic picture of quasi-equilibrium saturation and provide evidence that the "bosenova" collapse does not occur in most of the astrophysical parameter space. Compared to gravitational superradiance, we find that gravitational wave "annihilation" signals and black hole spin-down are parametrically suppressed with increasing interactions, while new gravitational wave "transition" signals can take place for moderate interactions. The novel phenomenon of scalar wave emission is less suppressed at large couplings, and if the particle has Standard Model interactions, then coherent, monochromatic axion wave signals from black hole superradiance may be detectable in proposed axion dark matter experiments.
Black-hole superradiance has been used to place very strong bounds on a variety of models of ultralight bosons such as axions, new light scalars, and dark photons. It is common lore to believe that superradiance bounds are broadly model independent and therefore pretty robust. In this work we show however that superradiance bounds on dark photons can be challenged by simple, compelling extensions of the minimal model. In particular, if the dark photon populates a larger dark sector and couples to dark fermions playing the role of dark matter, then superradiance bounds can easily be circumvente…
An inhomogeneous pseudo-scalar field configuration behaves like an optically active medium. Consequently, if a light ray passes through an axion cloud surrounding a Kerr black hole, it may experience a polarization-dependent bending. We explore the size and relevance of such effect considering both the QCD axion and a generic axion-like particle.
Black hole superradiance, which only relies on gravitational interactions, can provide a powerful probe of the existence of ultralight bosons that are weakly coupled to ordinary matter. However, as a boson cloud grows through superradiance, nonlinear effects from interactions with itself or other fields may become important. As a representative example of this, we use nonlinear evolutions to study black hole superradiance of a vector boson that attains a mass, via a coupling to a complex scalar, through the Higgs mechanism. For the cases considered, we find that the superradiant instability ca…
Tidal effects have long ago locked the Moon in synchronous rotation with the Earth and progressively increase the Earth-Moon distance. This "tidal acceleration" hinges on dissipation. Binaries containing black holes may also be tidally accelerated, dissipation being caused by the event horizon - a flexible, viscous one-way membrane. In fact, this process is known for many years under a different guise: superradiance. In General Relativity, tidal acceleration is obscured by gravitational-wave emission. However, when coupling to light scalar degrees of freedom is allowed, an induced dipole momen…
Superradiant scattering is a radiation enhancement process that takes place in many contexts, and which has recently found exciting applications in astro and particle physics. In the framework of curved spacetime physics, it has been associated with the classical Penrose process for particles. Superradiance is usually also associated with bosonic fields around geometries with ergoregions and horizons. These notions are in clear tension however: the Penrose process occurs for horizonless geometries, and particles are composed of fermions. Here, we resolve the tension in its different aspects, b…
Measurements of the spin of stellar mass black holes (BHs) are now possible both through LIGO observations of binary BH mergers and for BHs in X-ray binary systems. The spins of BHs as inferred from LIGO observations suggest that BH spins are on the lower end of what is expected for a ``flat'' distribution of spins, while those from BHs in X-ray binaries tend to be large. Superradiance, a process that can effectively reduce the spin of BHs before they merge, could explain the lower observed spins in binary BH mergers for a non self-interacting light boson. In this paper, we use Bayesian analys…
Vortices and black holes set the scene for many interesting dynamical processes in physics. Here, we study the dynamical instability of quantised vortices and rotational superradiance around rotating black holes, illustrating in the process that the same physics is at play in these two seemingly disparate phenomena. We also compare the instability of the vortex to the black hole bomb instability, which occurs for massive scalar fields in the Kerr spacetime. Taking inspiration from the analogy between black hole bomb modes and the hydrogen spectrum, the vortex instability is compared with nucle…
The superradiant scattering of massive scalar particles by a rotating mini black hole is investigated. Imposing the mirror boundary condition, the system becomes the so called black-hole bomb where the rotation energy of the black hole is transferred to the scattered particle exponentially with time. Bulk emissions as well as brane emissions are considered altogether. It is found that the largest effects are expected for the brane emission of lower angular modes with lighter mass and larger angular momentum of the black hole. Possibilities of the forming the black-hole bomb at the LHC are disc…
Superradiance is a process by which massive bosonic particles can extract energy from spinning black holes, leading to the build up of a "cloud" if the particle has a Compton wavelength comparable to the black hole's Schwarzschild radius. One interesting possibility is that superradiance may occur for photons in a diffuse plasma, where they gain a small effective mass. Studies of the spin-0 case have indicated that such a build up is suppressed by a spatially varying effective mass, supposed to mimic the photons' interaction with a physically realistic plasma density profile. We carry out rela…
We investigate the ringdown waveform and reflectivity of a Lifshitz scalar field around a fixed Schwarzschild black hole. The radial wave equation is modified due to the Lorentz breaking terms, which leads to a diversity of ringdown waveforms. Also, it turns out that Lifshitz waves scattered by the Schwarzschild black hole exhibits superradiance. The Lorentz breaking terms lead to superluminal propagation and high-frequency modes can enter and leave the interior of the Killing horizon where negativity of energy is not prohibited. This allows the Lifshitz waves to carry out additional positive …
In the presence of an ultralight bosonic field, spinning black holes are unstable to superradiance. The rotational energy of the black hole is converted into a non-axisymmetric, oscillating boson cloud which dissipates through the emission of nearly monochromatic gravitational radiation. Thus, gravitational wave observations by ground- or space-based detectors can be used to probe the existence of dark particles weakly coupled to the Standard Model. In this work, we focus on massive vector bosons, which grow much faster through superradiance, and produce significantly stronger gravitational wa…
We perform extensive nonlinear numerical simulations of the spherical collapse of (charged) wavepackets onto a charged black hole within Einstein-Maxwell theory and in Einstein-Maxwell-scalar theory featuring nonminimal couplings and a spontaneous scalarization mechanism. We confirm that black holes in full-fledged Einstein-Maxwell theory cannot be overcharged past extremality and no naked singularities form, in agreement with the cosmic censorship conjecture. We show that naked singularities do not form even in Einstein-Maxwell-scalar theory, although it is possible to form scalarized black h…
The approximate solution of the Klein-Gordon equation for a real scalar field of mass $μ$ in the geometry of a Kerr black hole obtained by Detweiler \cite{Detweiler:1980uk} is widely used in the analysis of the stability of black holes as well as the search of axion-like particles. In this work, we confirm a missing factor $1/2$ in this solution, which was first identified in Ref.~\cite{Pani:2012bp}. The corrected result has strange features that put questions on the power-counting strategy. We solve this problem by adding the next-to-leading order (NLO) contribution. Compared to the numerical…
Interacting massive spin-1 fields have been widely used in cosmology and particle physics. We obtain a new condition on the validity of the classical limit of these theories related to the non-trivial constraints that exist for vector field components. A violation of this consistency condition causes a singularity in the time derivative of the auxiliary component and could impact, for example, the field's cosmic history and superradiance around black holes. Such a condition is expected to exist generically in many other non-trivially constrained systems.
In this thesis we study several dynamical processes involving black holes in four and higher dimensions. First, using perturbative techniques, we compare the massless and massive scalar radiation emitted by a particle radially infalling into a Schwarzchild black hole. We show that the late-time waveform of massive scalar perturbations is dominated by a universal oscillatory decaying tail, which appears due to curvature effects. We also show that the energy spectrum is in perfect agreement with a ZFL calculation once no-hair properties of black holes are taken into account. In the second part, …
The deformability of a compact object under the presence of a tidal perturbation is encoded in the tidal Love numbers (TLNs), which vanish for isolated black holes in vacuum. We show that the TLNs of black holes surrounded by matter fields do not vanish and can be used to probe the environment around binary black holes. In particular, we compute the TLNs for the case of a black hole surrounded by a scalar condensate under the presence of scalar and vector tidal perturbations, finding a strong power-law behavior of the TLN in terms of the mass of the scalar field. Using this result as a proxy f…
In electrovacuum stationary, asymptotically flat black holes in scalar-tensor theories of gravity are described by the Kerr-Newman family of solutions, just as in general relativity. We show that there exist two mechanisms which can render Kerr black holes unstable when matter is present in the vicinity of the black hole, as this induces an effective mass for the scalar. The first mechanism is a tachyonic instability that appears when the effective mass squared is negative, triggering the development of scalar hair --- a black hole version of "spontaneous scalarization". The second instability…
