Gravitational Collider Physics via Pulsar-Black Hole Binaries

TL;DR

This paper proposes using pulsar-black hole binaries to detect gravitational collider physics by observing deviations in orbital motion caused by boson cloud transitions, which can be measured through pulsar timing.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method to probe gravitational collider physics using pulsar timing of black hole binaries with boson clouds.

Findings

Pulsar timing can detect boson cloud transitions around black holes.

Resonance phenomena are observable with current pulsar-timing accuracy.

The method provides a new way to test gravitational physics beyond general relativity.

Abstract

We propose to use pulsar-black hole binaries as a probe of gravitational collider physics. Induced by the gravitation of the pulsar, the atomic transitions of the boson cloud around the black hole back-react on the orbital motion. This leads to the deviation of binary period decrease from that predicted by general relativity, which can be directly probed by the R{\o}mer delay of pulsar time-of-arrivals. The sensitivity and accuracy of this approach is estimated for two typical atomic transitions. It is shown that once the transitions happen within the observable window, the pulsar-timing accuracy is almost always sufficient to capture the resonance phenomenon.