Work

Common envelope evolution of ultralight boson clouds

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: Ultralight bosons can be excited around spinning black holes via black hole superradiance. These boson clouds may play an important role in the orbital evolution of binary black holes. In this work, we investigate the formation and evolution of common envelopes of ultralight boson clouds in comparable mass-ratio black hole binaries. We describe the cloud evolution using gravitational molecular eigenstates and analyze the possible level transitions during orbital decay, as well as the impact on orbital dynamics. We find that the cloud can generally lead to eccentricity growth. In particular, the eccentricity may vary significantly during level transition, leaving an eccentricity of ${\cal O}(0.1)$ within the detection band of ground-based gravitational wave detectors.

Source: Physical review. D/Physical review. D.

DOI: 10.1103/g79c-mqgx

Authors: Ao Guo, Qi-Yan Zhang, Huan Yang, Jun Zhang

Institutions: International Centre for Theoretical Physics Asia-Pacific, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Tsinghua University

Language: English

Topic: Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research

Subfield: Astronomy and Astrophysics

Field: Physics and Astronomy

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: green

Funders: National Natural Science Foundation of China, Chinese Academy of Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities

Awards: G1038122645, G1674611851, G4256408411, G5070104332, G8676581571