Extracting ultralight boson properties from boson clouds around post-merger remnants

Understand

Ultralight bosons are a class of hypothetical particles that could potentially solve critical problems in fields ranging from cosmology to astrophysics and fundamental physics.

• If ultralight bosons exist, they form clouds around spinning black holes with sizes comparable to their particle Compton wavelength through superradiance, a well-understood classical wave amplification process that has been studied for decades.
• After these clouds form, they dissipate and emit continuous gravitational waves through the annihilation of ultralight bosons into gravitons.
• These gravitons could be detected with ground-based gravitational-wave detectors using continuous-wave searches.