INTO THE LAIR: GRAVITATIONAL-WAVE SIGNATURES OF DARK MATTER

By C. F. Macedo, Paolo Pani, V. Cardoso, L. Crispino. 2013

155 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The nature and properties of dark matter (DM) are both outstanding issues in physics. Besides clustering in halos, the universal character of gravity implies that self-gravitating compact DM configurations—predicted by various models—might be spread throughout the universe. Their astrophysical signature can be used to probe fundamental particle physics, or to test alternative descriptions of compact objects in active galactic nuclei. Here, we discuss the most promising dissection tool of such configurations: the inspiral of a compact stellar-size object and consequent gravitational-wave (GW) emission. The inward motion of this “test probe” encodes unique information about the nature of the supermassive configuration. When the probe travels through some compact region we show, within a Newtonian approximation, that the quasi-adiabatic inspiral is mainly driven by DM accretion and by dynamical friction, rather than by radiation reaction. When accretion dominates, the frequency and amplitude of the GW signal produced during the latest stages of the inspiral are nearly constant. In the exterior region we study a model in which the inspiral is driven by GW and scalar-wave emission, described at a fully relativistic level. Resonances in the energy flux appear whenever the orbital frequency matches the effective mass of the DM particle, corresponding to the excitation of the central object's quasinormal frequencies. Unexpectedly, these resonances can lead to large dephasing with respect to standard inspiral templates, to such an extent as to prevent detection with matched filtering techniques. We discuss some observational consequences of these effects for GW detection.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b781bf266743f1e2e5210bc0eee347201f9a0aa9

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Citations in the corpus

Dynamical boson stars (2012, background): “At the lower frequencies targeted by LISA, if galaxies generally possess some extended, supermassive configuration, then the inspiral of small compact body into this field will result in both dynamical friction and dark matter accretion, in addition to radiationreaction [268].”
Testing black hole candidates with electromagnetic radiation (2015, background): “For instance, this is the case of some metrics describing the spacetime around certain exotic non-interacting matter (Bambi & Malafarina, 2013; Kesden et al., 2005; Macedo et al., 2013).”
Superradiance (2015, background): “The effect of dynamical friction and accretion for boson clouds as been studied in [517, 673] (see also [681] for related studies).”
Tests for the existence of black holes through gravitational wave echoes (2017, background): “Such tests are in principle feasible for wide classes of objects, including boson stars [80,87,175], gravastars [95,97,139], wormholes [176,177], or other quantum-corrected objects [121,125].”
Superradiance: Energy Extraction, Black-Hole Bombs and Implications for Astrophysics and Particle Physics (2015, background): “Bosons stars can be as compact as a NS and as massive as the BH candidate at the center of our galaxy [534, 530].”
Primordial black holes confront LIGO/Virgo data: current situation (2020, background): “Accretion introduces a further secular change to the orbital parameters, in addition to GW radiation-reaction [61, 64, 65].”