Methods and prospects for gravitational wave searches targeting ultralight vector boson clouds around known black holes

Understand

Ultralight bosons are predicted in many extensions to the Standard Model and are popular dark matter candidates.

• The black hole superradiance mechanism allows for these particles to be probed using only their gravitational interaction.
• In this scenario, an ultralight boson cloud may form spontaneously around a spinning black hole and extract a non-negligible fraction of the black hole's mass.
• These oscillating clouds produce quasi-monochromatic, long-duration gravitational waves that may be detectable by ground-based or space-based gravitational wave detectors.