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Schwarzschild black holes can wear scalar wigs

Juan Barranco, Argelia Bernal, Juan Carlos Degollado, Alberto Diez-Tejedor, Miguel Megevand, Miguel Alcubierre, Darío Núñez, Olivier Sarbach

TL;DR

The evolution of a massive scalar field surrounding a Schwarzschild black hole is studied and it is found that fairly arbitrary initial data evolve, at late times, as a combination of those long-lived configurations.

Abstract

We study the evolution of a massive scalar field surrounding a Schwarzschild black hole and find configurations that can survive for arbitrarily long times, provided the black hole or the scalar field mass is small enough. In particular, both ultra-light scalar field dark matter around supermassive black holes and axion-like scalar fields around primordial black holes can survive for cosmological times. Moreover, these results are quite generic, in the sense that fairly arbitrary initial data evolves, at late times, as a combination of those long-lived configurations.

Schwarzschild black holes can wear scalar wigs

TL;DR

The evolution of a massive scalar field surrounding a Schwarzschild black hole is studied and it is found that fairly arbitrary initial data evolve, at late times, as a combination of those long-lived configurations.

Abstract

We study the evolution of a massive scalar field surrounding a Schwarzschild black hole and find configurations that can survive for arbitrarily long times, provided the black hole or the scalar field mass is small enough. In particular, both ultra-light scalar field dark matter around supermassive black holes and axion-like scalar fields around primordial black holes can survive for cosmological times. Moreover, these results are quite generic, in the sense that fairly arbitrary initial data evolves, at late times, as a combination of those long-lived configurations.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 10 equations, 3 figures.

Figures (3)

  • Figure 1: The imaginary part of the frequency for the first quasi-resonant mode obtained using Leaver's method is shown as function of $M \mu$ for the cases $\ell=0,1$.
  • Figure 2: Combinations of the parameters $M$ and $\mu$ for which the SF half-life time can be larger than the age of the universe.
  • Figure 3: Fourier transform in time of the evolution of initial data with $R_1=100$, $R_2=200$ (top panel); and $R_1=-1000$, $R_2=1000$ (bottom panel). The peaks to the right of the resonance band in the top panel are a numerical artifact caused by noise originating at the outer boundary.