Probing the Existence of New Particles using Compact Objects

In the next few years, upgraded Advanced LIGO may see gravitational waves from thousands of compact object mergers such as binary black holes and neutron stars. This marks the beginning of a new era of precision measurements in physics. In this work, we explore the possibility that the dynamics of compact objects can be used to probe the existence of new particles including dark matter constituents. With a massive scalar field, a rotating black hole is unstable to a superradiant instability.  This process extracts rotational energy from the black hole. We explore this process as a way to look for QCD axions, dark photons, and other ultralight bosons with a Compton wavelength comparable to the black hole’s radius.