Search for ultralight bosons and primordial black holes with a population of binary black holes – the present and the future

PIRSA ID: 21100029
Series: Strong Gravity
Event Type: Seminar
Scientific Area(s):
Strong Gravity
End date:
Speaker(s):
  • Kwan Yeung Ng, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

In this talk, I will present how gravitational-wave (GW) measurements can be utilized to search for ultralight bosons and primordial black holes (PBHs), which can be the keys to some of the unsolved questions about our Universe. In the first half, I will discuss the current constraints on excluding the mass of ultralight bosons around ~10^-13 eV, based on the mass-spin measurements of BBHs from the second GW catalog (GWTC-2). These constraints are driven by the phenomenology called “superradiance”, which extracts the angular momentum of a rapidly spinning black hole to form a slowly spinning black hole-boson cloud system. In the second half, I will illustrate how the distance measurements of very high-redshift BBHs made by the next-generation GW detectors may provide cleaner hints or constraints for the existence of PBHs in the future.

Zoom Link: https://pitp.zoom.us/j/95012157554?pwd=UWdBZ1FOTSt2dVlBaS81MjRLbVBvUT09