# Black-hole bombs and photon-mass bounds.

@article{Pani2012BlackholeBA,
title={Black-hole bombs and photon-mass bounds.},
author={Paolo Pani and Vitor Cardoso and Leonardo Gualtieri and Emanuele Berti and Akihiro Ishibashi},
journal={Physical review letters},
year={2012},
volume={109 13},
pages={
131102
}
}
• Published 3 September 2012
• Physics
• Physical review letters
Generic extensions of the standard model predict the existence of ultralight bosonic degrees of freedom. Several ongoing experiments are aimed at detecting these particles or constraining their mass range. Here we show that massive vector fields around rotating black holes can give rise to a strong superradiant instability, which extracts angular momentum from the hole. The observation of supermassive spinning black holes imposes limits on this mechanism. We show that current supermassive black…
143 Citations

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