Speaker
Description
Axion fields can form exponentially growing gravitational clouds around compact objects through self-interaction–driven relaxation of ambient axion waves. As the field amplitude approaches the axion decay constant, nonlinear effects become important. We identify two distinct regimes of late-time evolution, determined by the gravitational fine-structure constant and the cloud growth rate: a Bosenova regime, characterized by collapse accompanied by explosive axion bursts, and a saturation regime, in which self-interaction–induced axion emission balances accretion. In the latter regime, the emitted axion radiation exhibits stable discrete spectral lines at odd multiples of the bound-state energy, directly encoding the structure of the axion self-interaction potential. We show that single-cosine potentials and QCD axion-like potentials predict distinct emission spectra, opening the possibility of probing the underlying axion self-interaction structure and its ultraviolet completion through terrestrial detection of relativistic axion fluxes from compact objects.