The use of modern effective field theory techniques has sparked significant developments in many areas of physics, including the study of gravity. Case in point, such techniques have recently been used to show that binary black holes can amplify incident, low-frequency radiation due to an interplay between absorption at the horizons and momentum transfer in the bulk of the spacetime. In this paper, we further examine the consequences of this superradiant mechanism on the dynamics of an ambient scalar field by taking the binary’s long-range gravitational potential into account at the nonperturbative level. Doing so allows us to capture the formation of scalar clouds that are gravitationally bound to the binary. If the scalar is light enough, the cloud can be sufficiently diffuse (i.e., dilute while having considerable spatial extent) that it engulfs the binary as a whole. Its subsequent evolution exhibits an immensely rich phenomenology, which includes exponential growth, beating patterns, and the upscattering of bound states into scalar waves. While we find that these effects have negligible influence on the binary’s inspiral in the regime wherein our approximations are valid, they offer new, analytic insight into how binary black holes interact with external perturbations. They may also provide useful, qualitative intuition for interpreting the results from future numerical simulations of these complex systems.
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