Probing ultra-light bosons with stellar tidal disruption events

• Daniel Egana-Ugrinovic (Perimeter Institute)

Room: Graduate Building D-122 Ultra-light bosons such as axions and dark photons are copiously produced around black holes due to the superradiant instability, a purely gravitational process that creates a cloud of ultra-light bosons at the expense of the black hole's mass and spin. In this talk I show that the superradiant spin-down of super-massive black holes is uniquely imprinted in measurements of stellar tidal disruption event (TDE) rates, and propose to look for these effects in upcoming TDE rate measurements by the LSST. I show that these measurements could then reveal or set constraints on the existence of axions or dark photons with masses ranging from 10^{-18} eV to 10^{-20} eV, regardless of their cosmological abundances, and without requiring any interactions between these new bosons and the SM particles beyond gravity.