2012

Superradiant instabilities in astrophysical systems

Witek, Helvi, Cardoso, Vitor, Ishibashi, Akihiro et al.

Understand

Light bosonic degrees of freedom have become a serious candidate for dark matter.

  • The evolution of these fields around curved spacetimes is poorly understood but is expected to display interesting effects.
  • In particular, the interaction of light bosonic fields with supermassive black holes, key players in most galaxies, could provide colourful examples of superradiance and nonlinear bosenova-like collapse.
  • In turn, the observation of spinning black holes is expected to impose stringent bounds on the mass of putative massive bosonic fields in our universe.

Reading the bibliography…