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Black-Hole Bombs and Photon-Mass Bounds

Paolo Pani, Vitor Cardoso, Leonardo Gualtieri, Emanuele Berti, and Akihiro Ishibashi
Phys. Rev. Lett. 109, 131102 – Published 27 September 2012
Physics logo See Synopsis: Black Holes Weigh the Possibility of a Massive Photon

Abstract

Generic extensions of the standard model predict the existence of ultralight bosonic degrees of freedom. Several ongoing experiments are aimed at detecting these particles or constraining their mass range. Here we show that massive vector fields around rotating black holes can give rise to a strong superradiant instability, which extracts angular momentum from the hole. The observation of supermassive spinning black holes imposes limits on this mechanism. We show that current supermassive black-hole spin estimates provide the tightest upper limits on the mass of the photon (mv4×1020eV according to our most conservative estimate), and that spin measurements for the largest known supermassive black holes could further lower this bound to mv1022eV. Our analysis relies on a novel framework to study perturbations of rotating Kerr black holes in the slow-rotation regime, that we developed up to second order in rotation, and that can be extended to other spacetime metrics and other theories.

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  • Received 23 April 2012

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.109.131102

© 2012 American Physical Society

Synopsis

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Black Holes Weigh the Possibility of a Massive Photon

Published 27 September 2012

New calculations of hypothetical “black hole bombs” set an upper limit on the possible mass of the photon and on the existence of certain dark matter candidates.

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Authors & Affiliations

Paolo Pani1,*, Vitor Cardoso1,2, Leonardo Gualtieri3, Emanuele Berti2,4, and Akihiro Ishibashi5,6

  • 1CENTRA, Departamento de Física, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade Técnica de Lisboa-UTL, Avenida Rovisco Pais 1, 1049 Lisboa, Portugal
  • 2Department of Physics and Astronomy, The University of Mississippi, University, Mississippi 38677, USA
  • 3Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Roma “La Sapienza” and Sezione, INFN Roma1, Piazzale Aldo Moro 5, 00185, Roma, Italy
  • 4California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91109, USA
  • 5Theory Center, Institute of Particle and Nuclear Studies, High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK), Tsukuba, 305-0801, Japan
  • 6Department of Physics, Kinki University, Higashi-Osaka 577-8502, Japan

  • *paolo.pani@ist.utl.pt

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Issue

Vol. 109, Iss. 13 — 28 September 2012

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