Hunting gravitational wave black holes with microlensing

Abstract

Gravitational microlensing is a powerful tool to search for a population of invisible black holes (BHs) in the Milky Way (MW), including isolated BHs and binary BHs at wide orbits that are complementary to gravitational wave observations. By monitoring highly populated regions of source stars like the MW bulge region, one can pursue microlensing events due to these BHs. We find that if BHs have a Salpeter-like mass function extended beyond $30M_\odot$ and a similar velocity and spatial structure to stars in the Galactic bulge and disk regions, the BH population is a dominant source of the microlensing events at long timescales of the microlensing light curve $\gtrsim 100~$days. This is due to a boosted sensitivity of the microlensing event rate to lens mass, given as $M^2$, for such long-timescale events. A monitoring observation of $2 \times 10^{10}$ stars in the bulge region over 10 years with the Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) would enable one to find about $6\times 10^5$ BH microlensing events. We evaluate the efficiency of potential LSST cadences for characterizing the light curves of BH microlensing and find that nearly all events of long timescales can be detected.