Speaker
Giovanni Maria Tomaselli
Description
Ultralight bosons can be produced by rotating black holes through superradiance, forming so-called "gravitational atoms". When these are part of a binary system, they give rise to a rich phenomenology. In this talk, I focus on two distinct scenarios. First, for an inspiralling compact binary, I show that the combination of infinitely many resonances and the "ionization jumps" creates a smooth evolution of the binary and its GWs, which is tricky to correctly capture numerically. Second, I show that when a gravitational atom is in a nuclear star cluster, such as the Sgr A* cluster, it induces a measurable precession of the stellar orbits, and drives some of them to decay into the supermassive black hole in a few Myr.