Wednesday, September 26, 2012
Weighing light with black holes
Our recent Physical Review Letters paper and the companion Physical Review D article are nicely covered by Edwin Smith for Ole Miss News.
The article received media coverage from New Scientist, phys.org, Science Daily, the Physics Today blog, the Portuguese newspaper Expresso and the Italian website Gaia News. It was also featured on the front page of the APS website and as an APS Physics Synopsis.
The idea is that ultralight bosons with nonzero mass can produce a “black hole bomb” - a strong instability that would extract energy from the black hole very quickly and spin the hole down. However we do observe spinning black holes in the Universe. These observations can be used to set bounds on the mass of hypothetical massive photons. With this technique we constrained the mass of the photon to be about one hundred times smaller than the previously accepted bound.