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Ionization of Gravitational Atoms

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arxiv 2112.14777 v2 pith:EWYQ6H4Y submitted 2021-12-29 gr-qc hep-phhep-th

Daniel Baumann , Gianfranco Bertone , John Stout , Giovanni Maria Tomaselli This is my paper
classification gr-qchep-phhep-th
keywords gravitationalcompanionatomsbinarycloudionizationaccretionblack
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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Superradiant instabilities may create clouds of ultralight bosons around rotating black holes, forming so-called "gravitational atoms." It was recently shown that the presence of a binary companion can induce resonant transitions between bound states of these clouds, whose backreaction on the binary's orbit leads to characteristic signatures in the emitted gravitational waves. In this work, we show that the interaction with the companion can also trigger transitions from bound to unbound states of the cloud -- a process that we refer to as "ionization" in analogy with the photoelectric effect in atomic physics. The orbital energy lost in the process overwhelms the losses due to gravitational wave emission and contains sharp features carrying information about the energy spectrum of the cloud. Moreover, we also show that if the companion is a black hole, then the part of the cloud impinging on the event horizon will be absorbed. This "accretion" leads to a significant increase of the companion's mass, which alters the dynamical evolution and ensuing waveform of the binary. We argue that a combined treatment of resonances, ionization, and accretion is crucial to discover and characterize gravitational atoms with upcoming gravitational wave detectors.

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Cited by 9 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Perturbing Gravitational Atoms: Negative Love, Resonant Tides and Shifted Resonances

    gr-qc 2026-07 accept novelty 7.0 of 10

    Spinning gravitational atoms have negative static Love numbers enhanced by O(10²–10³) over non-spinning clouds, with internal perturbations shifting binary resonances.

  2. Trails of clouds in binary black holes

    gr-qc 2025-12 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    Boson clouds around binary black holes generically deplete through orbital resonances, driving eccentricity and spin-orbit tilt toward fixed points—including off-equatorial ones—leaving observable gravitational-wave trails.

  3. Ultralight Boson Ionization from Comparable-Mass Binary Black Holes

    gr-qc 2025-09 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    Ionization of boson molecules bound to a black hole binary can dominate gravitational-wave losses during early inspiral, imprinting a turnover in the nanohertz GW background and circularizing the orbit.

  4. Relativistic Tidal Transitions of Saturated Kerr Boson Clouds

    astro-ph.GA 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Relativistic Kerr wavefunctions change tidal transition matrix elements of saturated boson clouds by up to 21.7% relative to the hydrogenic approximation, with the radial profile responsible for ~80% of the change.

  5. Finite Coherence in Gravitational Waves from Tidally Excited Axion Clouds

    gr-qc 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0 of 10

    Gravitational-wave radiation from tidally driven Bohr crossings of black-hole axion clouds is controlled by outgoing two-level coherence, finite only for intermediate Landau-Zener sweep rates.

  6. Exact Regions of Superradiant Instability of Kerr-Newman Black Holes and Massive Scalar Fields

    gr-qc 2025-10 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Superradiant instability of Kerr-Newman black holes is confined to μ > qQ/M and below an analytically determined boundary that disagrees with older numerics.

  7. Scalar fields from nonlinear sigma models on black hole spacetimes

    gr-qc 2025-08 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Numerical evolutions show positive-curvature SL(2,R) sigma-model scalars create denser clouds and earlier binary mergers, while negative-curvature O(3) scalars spread out and delay mergers.

  8. Extreme mass-ratio inspiral within an ultralight scalar cloud I. Scalar radiation

    gr-qc 2025-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Scalar radiation from an EMRI in an ultralight scalar cloud is computed semi-analytically, showing dipole clouds decelerate and quadrupole clouds accelerate the inspiral, with up to about 100 rad dephasing after 18 months.

  9. Sequential simulation-based inference for extreme mass ratio inspirals

    gr-qc 2025-05 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Sequential simulation-based inference with truncated marginal neural ratio estimation shrinks the 11-parameter search volume for simulated non-spinning extreme-mass-ratio inspirals by factors of 1e6 to 1e7 and recover...

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