Discovering the QCD axion with black holes and gravitational waves
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Advanced LIGO may be the first experiment to detect gravitational waves. Through superradiance of stellar black holes, it may also be the first experiment to discover the QCD axion with decay constant above the grand unification scale. When an axion's Compton wavelength is comparable to the size of a black hole, the axion binds to the black hole, forming a ``gravitational atom.'' Through the superradiance process, the number of axions occupying the bound levels grows exponentially, extracting energy and angular momentum from the black hole. Axions transitioning between levels of the gravitational atom and axions annihilating to gravitons can produce observable gravitational wave signals. The signals are long lasting, monochromatic, and can be distinguished from ordinary astrophysical sources. We estimate up to $\mathcal{O}(1)$ transition events at aLIGO for an axion between $1{0}^{\ensuremath{-}11}$ and $1{0}^{\ensuremath{-}10}\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{eV}$ and up to $1{0}^{4}$ annihilation events for an axion between $1{0}^{\ensuremath{-}13}$ and $1{0}^{\ensuremath{-}11}\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{eV}$. In the event of a null search, aLIGO can constrain the axion mass for a range of rapidly spinning black hole formation rates. Axion annihilations are also promising for much lighter masses at future lower-frequency gravitational wave observatories; the rates have large uncertainties, dominated by supermassive black hole spin distributions. Our projections for aLIGO are robust against perturbations from the black hole environment and account for our updated exclusion on the QCD axion of $6\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}1{0}^{\ensuremath{-}13}\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{eV}<{\ensuremath{\mu}}_{a}<2\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}1{0}^{\ensuremath{-}11}\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{eV}$ suggested by stellar black hole spin measurements.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it