Superradiant Instability Research Articles

Black resonators and geons in AdS5

We construct dynamical black hole solutions with a helical symmetry in AdS5, called black resonators, as well as their horizonless limits, called geons. We introduce a cohomogeneity-1 metric describing a class of black resonators and geons whose isometry group is . This allows us to study them in a wide range of parameters. We obtain the phase diagram for the black resonators, geons, and Myers–Perry-AdS5, where the black resonators emerge from the onset of a superradiant instability of the Myers–Perry-AdS5 with equal angular momenta and are connected to the geons in the small horizon limit. The angular velocities of the black resonators always satisfy in units of the AdS radius. A black resonator is shown to have higher entropy than a Myers–Perry-AdS5 black hole with the same asymptotic charges. This implies that the Myers–Perry-AdS5 can dynamically evolve into the black resonator under the exact -symmetry although its endpoint will be further unstable to -violating perturbations.

Ultralight boson cloud depletion in binary systems

Ultralight scalars can extract rotational energy from astrophysical black holes through superradiant instabilities, forming macroscopic boson clouds. This process is most efficient when the Compton wavelength of the boson is comparable to the size of the black hole horizon, i.e. when the "gravitational fine structure constant" $\alpha\equiv G \mu M/\hbar c\sim 1$. If the black hole/cloud system is in a binary, tidal perturbations from the companion can produce resonant transitions between the energy levels of the cloud, depleting it by an amount that depends on the nature of the transition and on the parameters of the binary. Previous cloud depletion estimates considered binaries in circular orbit and made the approximation $\alpha\ll 1$. Here we use black hole perturbation theory to compute instability rates and decay widths for generic values of $\alpha$, and we show that this leads to much larger cloud depletion estimates when $\alpha \gtrsim 0.1$. We also study eccentric binary orbits. We show that in this case resonances can occur at all harmonics of the orbital frequency, significantly extending the range of frequencies where cloud depletion may be observable with gravitational wave interferometers.

Follow-up signals from superradiant instabilities of black hole merger remnants

Superradiant instabilities can trigger the formation of bosonic clouds around rotating black holes. If the bosonic field growth is sufficiently fast, these clouds could form shortly after a binary black hole merger. Such clouds are continuous sources of gravitational waves whose detection (or lack thereof) can probe the existence of ultralight bosons (such as axionlike particles) and their properties. Motivated by the binary black hole mergers seen by Advanced LIGO so far, we investigate in detail the parameter space that can be probed with continuous gravitational wave signals from ultralight scalar field clouds around black hole merger remnants with particular focus on future ground-based detectors (A+, Voyager and Cosmic Explorer). We also study the impact that the confusion noise from a putative stochastic gravitational-wave background from unresolved sources would have on such searches and we estimate, under different astrophysical priors, the number of binary black hole merger events that could lead to an observable postmerger signal. Under our most optimistic assumptions, Cosmic Explorer could detect dozens of postmerger signals.

Quantum-corrected rotating black holes and naked singularities in ( 2+1 ) dimensions

We analytically investigate the pertubative effects of a quantum conformally-coupled scalar field on rotating (2+1)-dimensional black holes and naked singularities. In both cases we obtain the quantum-backreacted metric analytically. In the black hole case, we explore the quantum corrections on different regions of relevance for a rotating black hole geometry. We find that the quantum effects lead to a growth of both the event horizon and the ergosphere, as well as to a reduction of the angular velocity compared to their corresponding unperturbed values. Quantum corrections also give rise to the formation of a curvature singularity at the Cauchy horizon and show no evidence of the appearance of a superradiant instability. In the naked singularity case, quantum effects lead to the formation of a horizon that hides the conical defect, thus turning it into a black hole. The fact that these effects occur not only for static but also for spinning geometries makes a strong case for the r\^ole of quantum mechanics as a cosmic censor in Nature.

Impact of multiple modes on the black-hole superradiant instability

Ultralight bosonic fields in the mass range $\sim (10^{-20}-10^{-11})\,{\rm eV}$ can trigger a superradiant instability that extracts energy and angular momentum from an astrophysical black hole with mass $M\sim(5,10^{10})M_\odot$, forming a nonspherical, rotating condensate around it. So far, most studies of the evolution and end-state of the instability have been limited to initial data containing only the fastest growing superradiant mode. By studying the evolution of multimode data in a quasi-adiabatic approximation, we show that the dynamics is much richer and depend strongly on the energy of the seed, on the relative amplitude between modes, and on the gravitational coupling. If the seed energy is a few percent of the black-hole mass, a black hole surrounded by a mixture of superradiant and nonsuperradiant modes with comparable amplitudes might not undergo a superradiant unstable phase, depending on the value of the boson mass. If the seed energy is smaller, as in the case of an instability triggered by quantum fluctuations, the effect of nonsuperradiant modes is negligible. We discuss the implications of these findings for current constraints on ultralight fields with electromagnetic and gravitational-wave observations.

Nonlinear Evolution of the AdS_{4} Superradiant Instability.

The superradiant instability of rotating black holes with negative cosmological constant is studied by numerically solving the full (3+1)-dimensional Einstein equations. We find evidence for an epoch dominated by a solution with a single helical Killing vector and a multistage process with distinct superradiant instabilities.

Superradiance and dynamical evolution of a charged scalar field in an asymptotically anti–de-Sitter dilatonic black hole

We study the dynamics of charged massless scalar fields in asymptotically anti–de Sitter (AdS) dilatonic black holes. The instability of the scalar field, which is triggered by the charged superradiant effect and Dirichlet boundary condition at AdS spatial infinity, can be notably described by exponential growth of the scalar field amplitude in time evolving and unstable quasinormal modes of scalar field perturbation. The numerical computation to demonstrate the superradiant instability of the charged scalar field are performed in the time domain and frequency domain, respectively. We confirm the mode that dominates long time behavior of scalar field matches with quasinormal mode obtained from frequency domain analysis quite well. It is well known the small Reissner-Nordstrom-anti–de Sitter (RN-AdS) black holes are superradiant unstable, while the large RN-AdS black holes are stable against the charged scalar perturbations. According to our numerical results, it is observed that the large dilatonic AdS black holes are also superradiant unstable. At last, we conclude that there exist rapid exponential growing superradiant modes in charged dilatonic AdS black holes, which is significant for the nonlinear dynamical evolution of charged superradiant instability.

Axionic instabilities and new black hole solutions

The coupling between scalar and vector fields has a long and interesting history. Axions are one key possibility to solve the strong CP problem and axion-like particles could be one solution to the dark matter puzzle. Given the nature of the coupling, and the universality of free fall, nontrivial important effects are expected in regions where gravity is strong. Here, we show that i. A background EM field induces an axionic instability in flat space, for large enough electric fields. Conversely, a homogeneous harmonic axion field induces an instability in the Maxwell sector. When carried over to curved spacetime, this phenomena translates into generic instabilities of charged black holes (BHs). ii. In the presence of charge, BH uniqueness results are lost. We find solutions which are small deformations of the Kerr-Newman geometry and hairy stationary solutions without angular momentum, which are `dragged' by the axion. Axion fields must exist around spinning BHs if these are immersed in external magnetic fields. The axion profile can be obtained perturbatively from the electro-vacuum solution derived by Wald. iii. Ultralight axions trigger superradiant instabilities of spinning BHs and form an axionic cloud in the exterior geometry. The superradiant growth can be interrupted or suppressed through axionic or scalar couplings to EM. These couplings lead to periodic bursts of light, which occur throughout the history of energy extraction from the BH. We provide numerical and simple analytical estimates for the rates of these processes. iv. Finally, we discuss how plasma effects can affect the evolution of superradiant instabilities.

Semicoherent analysis method to search for continuous gravitational waves emitted by ultralight boson clouds around spinning black holes

As a consequence of superradiant instability induced in Kerr black holes, ultra-light boson clouds can be a source of persistent gravitational waves, potentially detectable by current and future gravitational-wave detectors. These signals have been predicted to be nearly monochromatic, with a small steady frequency increase (spin-up), but given the several assumptions and simplifications done at theoretical level, it is wise to consider, from the data analysis point of view, a broader class of gravitational signals in which the phase (or the frequency) slightly wander in time. Also other types of sources, e.g. neutron stars in which a torque balance equilibrium exists between matter accretion and emission of persistent gravitational waves, would fit in this category. In this paper we present a robust and computationally cheap analysis pipeline devoted to the search of such kind of signals. We provide a full characterization of the method, through both a theoretical sensitivity estimation and through the analysis of syntethic data in which simulated signals have been injected. The search setup for both all-sky searches and higher sensitivity directed searches is discussed.

Dynamical signatures of black holes in massive Chern-Simons gravity: Quasibound modes and time evolution

Dynamical Chern-Simons (dCS) gravity is a promising extension of general relativity (GR), arising naturally from the low-energy limit of some string motivated theories. Even though dCS possesses an additional scalar degree of freedom, interestingly, the Schwarzschild black hole is an exact solution of it. Concerning dynamical phenomena, however, gravitational and scalar perturbations couple with each other, generating possible scenarios to understand the differences between dCS and GR. We study dynamical signatures of dCS considering that the scalar field potential has a mass term. We analyze the influence of the theory's parameter into the quasibound states and in the time evolution of purely gravitational initial profiles. We find that the coupling can make the dipolar modes \textit{less stable} and that at late times initial gravitational perturbations become contaminated with the scalar sector, presenting an oscillation that depends on the quasibound state frequencies. These results may be interesting in the light of superradiant instabilities in rotating systems and to find signatures of alternative theories in gravitational wave detections.

Massive Boson Superradiant Instability of Black Holes: Nonlinear Growth, Saturation, and Gravitational Radiation.

We study the superradiant instability of a massive boson around a spinning black hole in full general relativity without assuming spatial symmetries. We focus on the case of a rapidly spinning black hole in the presence of a vector boson with a Compton wavelength comparable to the black hole radius, which is the regime where relativistic effects are maximized. We follow the growth of the boson cloud through superradiance into the nonlinear regime as it spins down the black hole, reaches a maximum energy, and begins to dissipate through the emission of gravitational waves. We find that the superradiant instability can efficiently convert a significant fraction of a black hole's rotational energy into gravitational radiation.

Charged black hole bombs in a Minkowski cavity

Press and Teukolsky famously introduced the concept of a black hole bomb system: a scalar field scattering a Kerr black hole confined inside a mirror undergoes superradiant amplification that keeps repeating due to the reflecting boundary conditions at the mirror. A similar charged black hole bomb system exists if we have a charged scalar field propagating in a Reissner–Nordström black hole confined inside a box. We point out that scalar fields propagating in such a background are unstable not only to superradiance but also to a mechanism known as the near-horizon scalar condensation instability. The two instabilities are typically entangled but we identify regimes in the phase space where one of them is suppressed but the other is present, and vice-versa (we do this explicitly for the charged but non-rotating black hole bomb). These ‘corners’ in the phase space, together with a numerical study of the instabilities allow us to identify accurately the onset of the instabilities. Our results should thus be useful to make educated choices of initial data for the Cauchy problem that follows the time evolution and endpoint of the instabilities. Finally, we use a simple thermodynamic model (that makes no use of the equations of motion) to find the leading order thermodynamic properties of hairy black holes and solitons that should exist as a consequence (and that should be the endpoint) of these instabilities. To find the properties of these hairy solutions at higher order in perturbation theory, the Einstein–Maxwell-scalar equations of motion would have to be solved.

Instability for massive scalar fields in Kerr-Newman spacetime

It is known that a massive charged scalar field can trigger a superradiant instability in the background of a Kerr-Newman black hole. In this paper, we present a numerical study of such an instability by using the continued fraction method. It is shown that for given a black hole, the unstable scalar mode with a specific azimuthal index $m$ only occurs in a finite region in the parameter space of the scalar field. The maximum mass of the scalar cloud is exactly the upper bound of the mass of the unstable modes. We show that due to the electromagnetic interaction between the scalar field and the Kerr-Newman black hole, the growth rate of the instability can be $15.7\%$ larger than that of a scalar field in Kerr spacetime of the same rotation parameter. In addition, we find a maximum value of the growth rate $\tau^{-1}=1.788\times 10^{-7}M^{-1}$, which is about $4\%$ larger than that in the Kerr case.

Black hole echology: The observer’s manual

While recent detections of gravitational waves from the mergers of binary black holes match well with the predictions of General Relativity (GR), they cannot directly confirm the existence of event horizons. Exotic compact objects (ECOs) are motivated by quantum models of black holes, and can have exotic structure (or a "wall") just outside the (would-be) horizon. ECOs produce similar ringdown waveforms to the GR black holes, but they are followed by delayed "echoes". By solving linearized Einstein equations we can model these echoes and provide analytic templates that can be used to compare to observations. For concreteness, we consider GW150914 event, detected by the LIGO/Virgo collaboration, and study the model dependence of its echo properties. We find that echoes are reasonably approximated by complex gaussians, with amplitudes that decay as a power law in time, while their width in time (frequency) grows (shrinks) over subsequent echoes. We also show that trapped modes between a perfectly reflecting wall and angular momentum barrier in Kerr metric can exhibit superradiant instability over long times, as expected.

Evading no-hair theorems: Hairy black holes in a Minkowski box

We find hairy black holes of Einstein-Maxwell theory with a complex scalar field that is confined inside a box in a Minkowski background. These regular hairy black holes are asymptotically flat and thus the presence of the box or mirror allows to evade well-known no-hair theorems. We also find the Israel surface stress tensor that the confining box must have to obey the energy conditions. In the zero horizon radius limit, these hairy black holes reduce to a regular asymptotically flat hairy soliton. We find our solutions using perturbation theory. At leading order, a hairy black hole can be seen as a Reissner-Nordstrom black hole placed on top of a hairy soliton with the same chemical potential (so that the system is in thermodynamic equilibrium). The hairy black holes merge with the Reissner-Nordstrom black hole family at the onset of the superradiant instability. When they co-exist, for a given energy and electric charge, hairy black holes have higher entropy than caged Reissner-Nordstrom black holes. Therefore, our hairy black holes are the natural candidates for the endpoint of charged superradiance in the Reissner-Nordstrom black hole mirror system.

Stimulated Axion Decay in Superradiant Clouds around Primordial Black Holes.

The superradiant instability can lead to the generation of extremely dense axion clouds around rotating black holes. We show that, despite the long lifetime of the QCD axion with respect to spontaneous decay into photon pairs, stimulated decay becomes significant above a minimum axion density and leads to extremely bright lasers. The lasing threshold can be attained for axion masses μ≳10^{-8} eV, which implies superradiant instabilities around spinning primordial black holes with mass ≲0.01 M_{⊙}. Although the latter are expected to be nonrotating at formation, a population of spinning black holes may result from subsequent mergers. We further show that lasing can be quenched by Schwinger pair production, which produces a critical electron-positron plasma within the axion cloud. Lasing can nevertheless restart once annihilation lowers the plasma density sufficiently, resulting in multiple laser bursts that repeat until the black hole spins down sufficiently to quench the superradiant instability. In particular, axions with a mass ∼10^{-5} eV and primordial black holes with mass ∼10^{24} kg, which may account for all the dark matter in the Universe, lead to millisecond bursts in the GHz radio-frequency range, with peak luminosities ∼10^{42} erg/s, suggesting a possible link to the observed fast radio bursts.

Effective stability against superradiance of Kerr black holes with synchronised hair

Kerr black holes with synchronised hair [1,2] are a counter example to the no hair conjecture, in General Relativity minimally coupled to simple matter fields (with mass μ) obeying all energy conditions. Since these solutions have, like Kerr, an ergoregion it has been a lingering possibility that they are afflicted by the superradiant instability, the same process that leads to their dynamical formation from Kerr. A recent breakthrough [3] confirmed this instability and computed the corresponding timescales for a sample of solutions. We discuss how these results and other observations support two conclusions: 1) starting from the Kerr limit, the increase of hair for fixed coupling μM (where M is the BH mass) increases the timescale of the instability; 2) there are hairy solutions for which this timescale, for astrophysical black hole masses, is larger than the age of the Universe. The latter conclusion introduces the limited, but physically relevant concept of effective stability. The former conclusion, allows us to identify an astrophysically viable domain of such effectively stable hairy black holes, occurring, conservatively, for Mμ≲0.25. These are hairy BHs that form dynamically, from the superradiant instability of Kerr, within an astrophysical timescale, but whose own superradiant instability occurs only in a cosmological timescale.

Superradiance of charged black holes in Einstein–Gauss–Bonnet gravity

In this paper we show that electrically charged black holes in Einstein–Gauss–Bonnet gravity suffer from a superradiant instability. It is triggered by a charged scalar field that fulfils Dirichlet boundary conditions at a mirror located outside the horizon. As in general relativity, the unstable modes exist provided that the mirror is located beyond a critical radius, making the instability a long wavelength one. We explore the effects of the Gauss–Bonnet corrections on the critical radius and find evidence that the critical radius decreases as the Gauss–Bonnet coupling α increases. Due to the, up to date, lack of an analytic rotating solution for Einstein–Gauss–Bonnet theory, this is the first example of a superradiant instability in the presence of higher curvature terms in the action.

Superradiant instabilities in the Kerr-mirror and Kerr-AdS black holes with Robin boundary conditions

It has been recently observed that a scalar field with Robin boundary conditions (RBCs) can trigger both a superradiant and a bulk instability for a BTZ black hole (BH). To understand the generality and scrutinize the origin of this behavior, we consider here the superradiant instability of a Kerr BH confined either in a mirror-like cavity or in AdS space, triggered also by a scalar field with RBCs. These boundary conditions are the most general ones that ensure the cavity/AdS space is an isolated system, and include, as a particular case, the commonly considered Dirichlet boundary conditions (DBCs). Whereas the superradiant modes for some RBCs differ only mildly from the ones with DBCs, in both cases we find that as we vary the RBCs, the imaginary part of the frequency may attain arbitrarily large positive values. We interpret this growth as being sourced by a bulk instability of both confined geometries when certain RBCs are imposed to either the mirror-like cavity or the AdS boundary, rather than by energy extraction from the BH, in analogy with the BTZ behavior.

Can black hole superradiance be induced by galactic plasmas?

Highly spinning Kerr black holes with masses M=1–100M⊙ are subject to an efficient superradiant instability in the presence of bosons with masses μ∼10−10–10−12eV. We observe that this matches the effective plasma-induced photon mass in diffuse galactic or intracluster environments (ωpl∼10−10–10−12eV). This suggests that bare Kerr black holes within galactic or intracluster environments, possibly even including the ones produced in recently observed gravitational wave events, are unstable to formation of a photon cloud that may contain a significant fraction of the mass of the original black hole. At maximal efficiency, the instability timescale for a massive vector is milliseconds, potentially leading to a transient rate of energy extraction from a black hole in principle as large as ∼1055ergs−1. We discuss possible astrophysical effects this could give rise to, including a speculative connection to Fast Radio Bursts.