Black hole scalar sirens in the Milky Way
Daniel Gavilan-Martin, Olivier Simon, Dhashin Krishna, Derek F. Jackson Kimball, Dmitry Budker, Arne Wickenbrock

TL;DR
This paper introduces the concept of black hole scalar sirens, which are persistent scalar emissions from spinning black holes in the Milky Way caused by superradiant instabilities, providing a new way to detect and study these otherwise invisible objects.
Contribution
The study models scalar emissions from Milky Way black holes as continuous sources, expanding the potential for detecting light scalars and black holes through gravitational and scalar signals.
Findings
Scalar emissions from black holes can be significantly stronger than cosmic scalar backgrounds.
The scalar signals have a broader energy spectrum and higher velocities than dark matter.
The framework applies to various black hole mass ranges, including supermassive and intermediate-mass black holes.
Abstract
Hypothetical light scalar particles trigger the superradiant instability around spinning black holes (BHs), causing clouds of scalars to grow around the BH. In the presence of sufficiently strong particle self-interactions (characterized by the decay constant ), scalars are ejected from BH orbits, resulting in coherent, non-relativistic emissions that continuously carry away the BH's angular momentum. Parameters exist for which cloud growth is much faster, and scalar depletion is much slower, than the age of the Galaxy. This defines a distinct class of astrophysical sources of scalars, which we call BH scalar sirens -- BHs that persistently emit scalars effectively forever. We compute the scalar background from the expected population of isolated stellar-mass BHs in the Milky Way, which are sirens for scalars in the mass range --eV and…
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Taxonomy
TopicsDark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena · Astrophysical Phenomena and Observations · Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research
