Implications of Einstein–Maxwell dilaton–axion gravity from the black hole continuum spectrum

String inspired models can serve as potential candidates to replace general relativity (GR) in the high-energy/high-curvature regime where quantum gravity is expected to play a vital role. Such models not only subsume the ultraviolet nature of gravity but also exhibit promising prospects in resolving issues like dark matter and dark energy, which cannot be adequately addressed within the framework of GR. The Einstein–Maxwell dilaton–axion (EMDA) theory that is central to this work is one such string inspired model arising in the low energy effective action of the heterotic string theory with interesting implications in inflationary cosmology and in the late-time acceleration of the Universe. It is therefore important to survey the role of such a theory in explaining astrophysical observations, e.g. the continuum spectrum of black holes which is expected to hold a wealth of information regarding the background metric. The Kerr–Sen space–time corresponds to the exact, stationary, and axisymmetric black hole solution in EMDA gravity, possessing dilatonic charge and angular momentum originating from the axionic field. In this work, we compute the theoretical spectrum from the accretion disc around quasars in the Kerr–Sen background assuming the thin accretion disc model due to Novikov and Thorne. This is then used to evaluate the theoretical estimates of optical luminosity for a sample of eighty Palomar Green quasars which are subsequently compared with the available observations. Our results based on χ analysis indicate that the dilaton parameter r ∼ 0.2 is favoured by optical observations of quasars which is further corroborated by other error estimators e.g. the Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency, the index of agreement and their modified versions. We further report that strong dilaton charges (r > 1.6) are disfavoured by quasar optical data and the spins associated with the quasars are also estimated.