Searching for string bosenovas with gravitational wave detectors
Abstract We study the phenomenology of a string bosenova explosion in vector superradiance clouds around spinning black holes, focusing on the observable consequences in gravitational wave detectors and accelerometers. During the superradiance growth of a dark photon cloud — which occurs for dark ph...
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| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
SpringerOpen
2025-01-01
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| Series: | Journal of High Energy Physics |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP01(2025)007 |
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| Summary: | Abstract We study the phenomenology of a string bosenova explosion in vector superradiance clouds around spinning black holes, focusing on the observable consequences in gravitational wave detectors and accelerometers. During the superradiance growth of a dark photon cloud — which occurs for dark photon masses m A ′ ~ 10 − 14 − 10 − 11 eV $$ {m}_{A^{\prime }}\sim {10}^{-14}-{10}^{-11}\textrm{eV} $$ around stellar-mass black holes ( m A ′ ~ 10 − 23 − 10 − 16 eV $$ {m}_{A^{\prime }}\sim {10}^{-23}-{10}^{-16}\textrm{eV} $$ for supermassive black holes) — the dark electromagnetic field might reach a critical field strength, when a network of dark photon strings is produced via a superheated phase transition. These dark photon strings will then absorb the energy in the background gauge fields and get ejected from the cloud, with total energy of the string network as large as the total rotational energy of the spinning black hole. In this paper, we study the subsequent evolution of this dense string network, and the resulting observational consequences depending on the unknown string tension, or almost equivalently, the ratio between the quartic and the gauge coupling in the Abelian Higgs model. Strings with large tension will dissipate into gravitational waves, detectable over a wide range of frequencies, from ~ nHz near supermassive blackholes, to ≳ 10MHz around stellar mass black holes. This is the first known source of high frequency gravitational waves, unconstrained by cosmological observations. The strain of this gravitational wave can be larger than 10−14 at low frequencies, lasting for longer than typical duration of experiments. Small tension strings, whose string networks can have total lengths as large as 1040 km, can travel to the earth with appreciable rate from any black hole in the Milky Way and interact with earth based accelerometers. If the Standard Model particles are directly charged under the dark photon, e.g. U(1)B−L, this interaction leads to an acceleration of Standard Model particles that is independent of the coupling strength. We work out the spectral density of this acceleration, and project that modern accelerometers and equivalence principle tests can be sensitive to the passing of these strings. |
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| ISSN: | 1029-8479 |