Constraints on ultralight scalar bosons within black hole spin measurements from LIGO-Virgo's GWTC-2

Abstract: Clouds of ultralight bosons - such as axions - can form around a rapidly spinning black hole, if the black hole radius is comparable to the bosons' wavelength. The cloud rapidly extracts angular momentum from the black hole, and reduces it to a characteristic value that depends on the boson's mass as well as on the black hole mass and spin. Therefore, a measurement of a black hole mass and spin can be used to reveal or exclude the existence of such bosons. Using the black holes released by LIGO and Virgo in their GWTC-2, we perform a simultaneous measurement of the black hole spin distribution at formation and the mass of the scalar boson. We find that the data strongly disfavors the existence of scalar bosons in the mass range between $1.3\times10^{-13}~\mathrm{eV}$ and $2.7\times10^{-13}~\mathrm{eV}$ for a decay constant $f_a\gtrsim 10^{14}~\mathrm{GeV}$. The statistical evidence is mostly driven by the two {binary black holes} systems GW190412 and GW190517, which host rapidly spinning black holes. The region where bosons are excluded narrows down if these two systems merged shortly ($\sim 10^5$ years) after the black holes formed.