Stimulated Axion Decay in Superradiant Clouds around Primordial Black Holes

The superradiant instability can lead to the generation of extremely dense axion clouds around rotating black holes. We show that, despite the long lifetime of the QCD axion with respect to spontaneous decay into photon pairs, stimulated decay becomes significant above a minimum axion density and leads to extremely bright lasers. The lasing threshold can be attained for axion masses mu greater than or similar to 10(-8) eV, which implies superradiant instabilities around spinning primordial black holes with mass less than or similar to 0.01 M-circle dot. Although the latter are expected to be nonrotating at formation, a population of spinning black holes may result from subsequent mergers. We further show that lasing can be quenched by Schwinger pair production, which produces a critical electron-positron plasma within the axion cloud. Lasing can nevertheless restart once annihilation lowers the plasma density sufficiently, resulting in multiple laser bursts that repeat until the black hole spins down sufficiently to quench the superradiant instability. In particular, axions with a mass similar to 10(-5) eV and primordial black holes with mass similar to 10(24) kg, which may account for all the dark matter in the Universe, lead to millisecond bursts in the GHz radio-frequency range, with peak luminosities similar to 10(42) erg/s, suggesting a possible link to the observed fast radio bursts.