Discovering the QCD Axion with Black Holes and Gravitational Waves

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 GUT scale. When an axions 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 O(1) transition events at aLIGO for an axion between 10^-11 and 10^-10 eV and up to 10^4 annihilation events for an axion between 10^-13 and 10^-11 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*10^-13 eV < ma < 2*10^-11 eV suggested by stellar black hole spin measurements.

The Last Vestiges of Naturalness

Direct LHC bounds on colored SUSY particles now corner naturalness more than the measured value of the Higgs mass does. Bounds on the gluino are of particular importance, since it radiatively sucks up the stop and Higgs-up soft masses. As a result, even models that easily accommodate a 125 GeV Higgs are almost as tuned as the simplest version of SUSY, the MSSM: at best at the percent level. In this paper, we further examine how current LHC results constrain naturalness in three classes of models that may relax LHC bounds on sparticles: split families, baryonic RPV, and Dirac gauginos. In models of split families and bRPV, the bounds on the gluino are only slightly reduced, resulting in a few percent tuning. In particular, having a natural spectrum in bRPV models typically implies that tops, Ws, and Zs are easily produced in the cascade decays of squarks and gluinos. The resulting leptons and missing energy push the gluino mass limit above 1 TeV. Even when the gluino has a Dirac mass and does not contribute to the stop mass at one loop, tuning reappears in calculable models because there is no symmetry imposing the supersoft limit. We conclude that, even if sparticles are found at LHC-14, naturalness will not emerge triumphant.