Journal article

First search for a stochastic gravitational-wave background from ultralight bosons

L Tsukada, T Callister, A Matas, P Meyers

Physical Review D | AMER PHYSICAL SOC | Published : 2019

Abstract

Ultralight bosons with masses in the range 10-13 eV≤mb≤10-12 eV can induce a superradiant instability around spinning black holes (BHs) with masses of order 10-100 M. This instability leads to the formation of a rotating "bosonic cloud" around the BH, which can emit gravitational waves (GWs) in the frequency band probed by ground-based detectors. The superposition of GWs from all such systems can generate a stochastic gravitational-wave background (SGWB). In this work, we develop a Bayesian data analysis framework to study the SGWB from bosonic clouds using data from Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo, building on previous work by Brito et al. [Phys. Rev. D 96, 064050 (2017)PRVDAQ2470-001010.1..

View full abstract

University of Melbourne Researchers

Grants

Awarded by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science


Funding Acknowledgements

We thank Richard Brito and Irina Dvorkin for their fruitful discussion and comments. L. Tis supported by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science KAKENHI Grant No. JP18J21709. Laser Interferometer Gravitational Observatory (LIGO) was constructed by the California Institute of Technology and Massachusetts Institute of Technology with funding from the National Science Foundation and operates under cooperative agreement No. PHY-0757058. A. M and P. M are supported by NSF Grant No. PHY1505870. Parts of this research were conducted by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav), through Project No. CE170100004. This paper carries LIGO Document Number LIGO-P1800232.