Gravitational Collider Physics - Horn Sheng Chia (GRAPPA, Amsterdam)

Wednesday 22 Jan 2020, 13:15 → 14:00 Europe/Stockholm

Gravitational wave astronomy will transform astrophysics in many ways; can it do the same for particle physics? Ultralight bosons exist in various proposed extensions to the Standard Model, and can form boson clouds around rotating black holes. In this talk, I will describe the dynamics of these clouds when they are part of binary systems. Remarkably, these dynamics can be formulated as “scattering events” that are quantified by a “S-matrix”. I will further discuss how these events can significantly backreact on the binary orbits, thereby affecting the gravitational waves emitted by the binary systems. These gravitational wave signatures allow us to infer the masses and intrinsic spins of these ultralight bosons, making binary black holes novel detectors for these ultralight fields.