Speaker: Horng Sheng Chia, Institute for Advanced Study
Abstract: Gravitational wave astronomy will transform astrophysics in many ways; can it do the same for particle physics? In this talk, I will describe how the gravitational waves emitted by binary systems offer us a new window onto physics beyond the Standard Model. I will focus on a specific class of new physics called ultralight bosons, which can spontaneously form boson clouds around rotating black holes. Remarkably, the dynamics of these clouds in binary systems can be formulated as “scattering events” that are quantified by a “S-matrix”. Furthermore, the signatures emitted by these binary systems allow us to infer the masses and intrinsic spins of these ultralight bosons, making binary black holes novel detectors for these putative new fields. I will end with a brief discussion on probes of other types of new physics, including current efforts to search for these novel signatures in the data.