Bosenova Collapse of Axion Cloud around a Rotating Black Hole

Motivated by possible existence of stringy axions with ultralight mass, we study the behavior of an axion field around a rapidly rotating black hole (BH) obeying the sine-Gordon equation by numerical simulations. Due to superradiant instability, the axion field extracts the rotational energy of the BH and the nonlinear self-interaction becomes important as the field grows larger. We present clear numerical evidences that the nonlinear effect leads to a collapse of the axion cloud and a subsequent explosive phenomena, which is analogous to the "bosenova" observed in experiments of Bose-Einstein condensate. The criterion for the onset of the bosenova collapse is given. We also discuss the reason why the bosenova happens by constructing an effective theory of a wavepacket model under the nonrelativistic approximation.