English

Black-hole hair from vector dark matter accretion

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2025-08-29 v2 High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

We model a single black hole in equilibrium with a dark photon-cold dark matter environment. Representing the dark photon as a Proca field, we show that a Schwarzschild black hole grows vector-field "hair" when allowed to accrete from an infinite homogeneous bath of particles far from the horizon. We solve the Proca equation in linear perturbation theory, separating it using the vector spherical harmonics and Frolov-Krtou\v{s}-Kubiz\v{n}\'{a}k-Santos approaches for the odd-parity and even-parity sectors, respectively. In the "particle" dark matter regime, the field is purely infalling and exhibits a sharply peaked density profile, in concordance with the particle dark matter "spikes" studied in the literature. In the "wave" regime, the field exhibits standing waves, and the profile is smeared. We find a dark-matter density amplification upward of 10710^7 near the horizon. Though small for most black holes, we find the mass enclosed in the cloud can reach 1%\sim 1 \% of the black hole mass for large supermassive black holes. These black holes are also most susceptible to vector dark matter accretion, with mass accretion rates as large as 10M/10 M_\odot/yr.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2506.06554,
  title  = {Black-hole hair from vector dark matter accretion},
  author = {Fredric Hancock and Helvi Witek},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.06554},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

23 pages, 7 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T03:04:29.592Z