Characterizing the continuous gravitational-wave signal from boson clouds around Galactic isolated black holes

Bosons such as axions or axion-like particles can form enormous clouds around black holes via the superradiance instability. As the bosons annihilate in the presence of the black hole, they produce a long-lived, slowly-evolving continuous gravitational-wave signal that is potentially detectable using the current generation of gravitational-wave interferometers.A non-detection can disfavor the existence of axions in certain mass ranges, although this is highly dependent on the Galactic black hole population. In this talk, I will discuss the expected annihilation signal from the population of isolated stellar-mass black holes in the Galaxy, and the prospects for detecting the signal using standard searches for continuous gravitational waves.