Self-organized criticality in boson clouds around black holes

Abstract: Boson clouds around black holes exhibit interesting physical phenomena through the Penrose process of superradiance, leading to black hole spin-down. Axionic clouds are of particular interest, since the axion Compton wavelength could be comparable to the Schwarzschild radius, leading to the formation of "gravitational atoms" with a black hole nucleus. These clouds collapse under certain conditions, leading to a "Bosenova". We model the dynamics of such unstable boson clouds by a simple cellular automaton and show that it exhibits self-organized criticality. Our results suggest that the evolution through the black hole Regge plane is due to self-organized criticality.