• Accepted Paper

Constraints on ultralight bosons from merging binary and remnant black holes observed during the second and third parts of the fourth LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA observing run

A. G. Abac et al.

Phys. Rev. D - Accepted 30 September, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/dgjv-chmt

Abstract

We present constraints on ultralight bosons using binary black hole mergers observed in the second and third parts of the fourth LIGO–Virgo–KAGRA observing run. Directed searches are conducted for long-transient gravitational waves from ultralight vector boson clouds around merger remnants, using a hidden-Markov-model (HMM) tracking scheme. We target the remnant black holes formed in the binary coalescences that produced GW250114 and GW250207. We find no evidence for such signals from either target. Estimating our search sensitivity at a threshold corresponding to a 1% false alarm probability, we thus disfavor vector boson masses in the range of [2.80,3.95]×10−13 eV with greater than 90% confidence. In addition, we derive constraints on ultralight scalar and vector bosons from the inferred high spins of the constituent black holes in three binaries, using events GW240515, GW241113, and GW241225_08. The excluded mass ranges in this approach depend on the assumed black-hole ages. At 105 years, corresponding to typical dynamically formed binaries, we exclude scalar and vector bosons in the ranges [1.39,6.94]×10−13 eV and [0.32,14.4]×10−13 eV at 90% confidence, respectively.

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