Analogue Binaries and Superradiance

May 12, 2022

The fuzzy nature of ultralight bosonic fields and their weak coupling to the Standard Model makes it extremely hard to probe their properties if not through gravity. The discovery of Superradiance around black holes makes them, with their extreme gravitational fields, the perfect lab to probe the nature of such Dark Matter candidates. Superradiance, the wave-like analogue of the famous Penrose process, allows a scalar wave (e.g. a bosonic field) to extract rotational energy from a black hole, leaving clear observational signatures that allow the placement of constrains on the mass of such ultralight fields. Superradiance in black hole spacetimes has been extensively studied over the last decade. By contrast, the dynamics of scalar fields in black holes binary systems has yet a long way to be fully understood. The increasing number of detected gravitational waves from compact object mergers and the development of next generation detectors makes it important to understand how exactly such ultralight fields can shape the dynamics of these binaries. By retaining the most fundamental aspects behind such astrophysical systems, the study of toy models can give us both qualitative and quantitative results towards a complete understanding of these dynamics and how upcoming data can be better used to probe its fundamental nature and properties.

Authors in the community:

• 

  D

  Diogo Gameiro Neves Currito Ribeiro

  ist187311

Supervisors of this institution:

• 

  V

  Vítor Manuel dos Santos Cardoso

  ist30771

physical-sciences - Physical sciences

por - Portuguese

Instituto Superior Técnico