Methodology for constraining ultralight vector bosons with gravitational wave searches targeting merger remnant black holes

TL;DR

This paper develops a statistical framework to constrain ultralight vector bosons using gravitational wave data from black hole mergers, accounting for uncertainties and potential particle-photon interactions, enhancing the search sensitivity.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method for constraining ultralight vector bosons via gravitational wave observations, considering uncertainties and kinetic mixing effects.

Findings

Next-generation detectors can probe unexplored parameter space.

The framework effectively marginalizes over black hole property uncertainties.

Constraints are robust even with weak kinetic mixing.

Abstract

Ultralight bosons are a hypothetical class of particles predicted under various extensions of Standard Model physics. As a result of the superradiance mechanism, we expect ultralight bosons, should they exist in certain mass ranges, to form macroscopic clouds around rotating black holes, so that we can probe their existence by looking for the long-transient gravitational wave emission produced by such clouds. In this paper, we propose a statistically robust framework for constraining the existence of ultralight vector bosons in the absence of detecting such a signal from searches targeting merger remnant black holes, effectively marginalizing over the uncertainties present in the properties of the target black holes. We also determine the impact of weak kinetic mixing with the ordinary photon and vector mass generation through a hidden Higgs mechanism on the constraining power of these searches. We find that individual follow-up searches, particularly with the next-generation gravitational wave detectors, can probe regions of parameter space for such models where robust constraints are still lacking.