Pulsar timing signal from ultralight scalar dark matter

By A. Khmelnitsky, V. Rubakov. 2013

207 citations recorded by the source corpus.

An ultralight free scalar field with mass around 10−23−10−22 eV is a viable dark mater candidate, which can help to resolve some of the issues of the cold dark matter on sub-galactic scales. We consider the gravitational field of the galactic halo composed out of such dark matter. The scalar field has oscillating in time pressure, which induces oscillations of gravitational potential with amplitude of the order of 10−15 and frequency in the nanohertz range. This frequency is in the range of pulsar timing array observations. We estimate the magnitude of the pulse arrival time residuals induced by the oscillating gravitational potential. We find that for a range of dark matter masses, the scalar field dark matter signal is comparable to the stochastic gravitational wave signal and can be detected by the planned SKA pulsar timing array experiment.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ed6bdd49a83ffc5bfc41a516865233288635e071

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

Citations in the corpus

The NANOGrav 15 yr Data Set: Evidence for a Gravitational-wave Background (2023, background): “Astrophysically motivated searches for sources that produce sinusoidal or sinusoid-like delays in the residuals, such as an individual SMBHB or perturbations to the local gravitational field induced by fuzzy dark matter (Khmelnitsky & Rubakov 2014), also yield Bayes factors ∼ 1.”
CONTRASTING GALAXY FORMATION FROM QUANTUM WAVE DARK MATTER, ψDM, WITH ΛCDM, USING PLANCK AND HUBBLE DATA (2015, background): “Various observable properties of this model have been proposed (Amendola & Barbieri 2006; Arvanitaki & Dubovsky 2011; Schive et al. 2014a, 2014b; Khmelnitsky & Rubakov 2014; Hlozek et al. 2015; Van Tilburg et al. 2015; Stadnik & Flambaum 2015).”
The International Pulsar Timing Array: First Data Release (2016, background): “…sufficient sensitivity to detect individual pulses from pulsars, as it quantifies the stability of pulsar pulse shapes on short time-scales, given by σJitter ∝ fJWeff ( 1 + m2I ) √ Np , (2) 1 See Khmelnitsky & Rubakov (2014) and Porayko & Postnov (2014) however for a potentially different origin.”
Ultralight scalars as cosmological dark matter (2016, background): “FDM might also be eventually detectable less directly by pulsar timing observations [35].”