Searching for ultralight bosons with black hole superradiance and gravitational waves

by Richard Brito ("Sapienza" Univ.)

Monday 4 Feb 2019, 16:00 → 17:30 Europe/Rome

Aula Conversi (Dip. di Fisica - Edificio G. Marconi)

Ultralight bosons can induce superradiant instabilities in spinning black holes, tapping their rotational energy to trigger the growth of a bosonic condensate around the black hole. In this talk I will give an overview on the possible observational imprints of the existence of these bosonic condensates which include (i) the emission of nearly monochromatic gravitational waves emitted by the condensate, potentially observable by current and future gravitational-wave detectors (ii) the formation of ``holes'' in the spin versus mass plane of astrophysical black holes and (iii) their imprint in black hole binaries.