25–27 Feb 2026
CERN
Europe/Zurich timezone
There is a live webcast for this event.

Black hole hair transplant with ultra light dark matter

25 Feb 2026, 11:10
10m
4/3-006 - TH Conference Room (CERN)

4/3-006 - TH Conference Room

CERN

110
Show room on map

Speaker

Dhruv Pathak (King's College London)

Description

You can create a black hole bomb using a Kerr black hole by putting mirrors around it. This can happen because of a phenomenon called superradiance using which an incident wave can get reflected back with larger energy. The mirror then reflects it back and you can keep on extracting energy until the limit is reached. For a massive field, the mass itself acts as a natural barrier. Ultra light dark matter fields, if they exist, can in principle satisfy the superradiance condition, and form a cloud around a Kerr black hole. We will talk about how the signatures of such a cloud can be detected or used to constrain masses of these particles. In particular, we focus on the Hz band in frequency, and also discuss how a stipulated IMBH population would affect it.

Authors

Christopher McCabe (King's College London) Dhruv Pathak (King's College London) Dr Diego Blas (ICREA/IFAE)

Presentation materials