Speaker
Description
Ultralight bosons, predicted in scenarios beyond the Standard Model and viable dark matter (DM)
Candidates can form superradiant clouds around spinning black holes, influencing their dynamics.
Using century-long monitored OJ287 supermassive black hole binary, we set the first DM–DM-independent,
dynamical constraints on their masses μ = (8.5−22)×10−22 eV. These dynamical constraints, driven
by boson cloud friction, are robust against DM-model uncertainties and offer a novel ultralight boson
probe. We show that analogous superradiant dynamics across the cosmic population of supermassive
black hole systems could help resolve the final-parsec evolution stalling problem and imprint a detectable
suppression and break in the gravitational wave background.
