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Into the lair: gravitational-wave signatures of dark matter

8 Pith papers cite this work, alongside 228 external citations. Polarity classification is still indexing.

8 Pith papers citing it
228 external citations · Pith
abstract

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 might be spread throughout the universe. The astrophysical signature of these objects may be used to probe fundamental particle physics, or even to provide an alternative description of compact objects in active galactic nuclei. Here we discuss the most promising dissection tool of these configurations: the inspiral of a compact stellar-size object and consequent gravitational-wave emission. The inward motion of this "test probe" encodes unique information about the nature of the central, supermassive DM configuration. When the probe travels through some compact DM profile we show that, within a Newtonian approximation, the quasi-adiabatic evolution of the inspiral is mainly driven by DM accretion into the small compact object and by dynamical friction, rather than by gravitational-wave radiation-reaction. These effects circularize the orbits and leave a peculiar imprint on the gravitational waves emitted at late time. When accretion dominates, the frequency and the amplitude of the gravitational-wave signal produced during the latest stages of the inspiral are nearly constant. In the exterior region we study a relativistic model in which the inspiral is driven by the emission of gravitational and scalar waves. Resonances in the energy flux appear whenever the orbital frequency matches the mass of the DM particle and they correspond 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 gravitational-wave detection.

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representative citing papers

Massive boson stars: Stability and GW emission in head-on mergers

gr-qc · 2025-12-17 · conditional · novelty 6.0

Quartically self-interacting massive boson stars are stable only up to the first mass maximum; their head-on mergers yield a boson-star remnant, a black hole at contact, or two black holes formed before contact, with radiated energy varying non-monotonically at strong coupling.

Boson Stars Hosting Black Holes

gr-qc · 2025-11-05 · unverdicted · novelty 5.0

Numerical and analytic modeling of boson star-black hole systems in the nonrelativistic limit, with Fisher analysis indicating LISA sensitivity to ultralight dark matter mass and self-coupling via gravitational wave dephasing.

Constraining light fermionic dark matter with binary pulsars

astro-ph.GA · 2019-06-25 · unverdicted · novelty 5.0

Dynamical friction from a degenerate fermionic dark matter background induces measurable secular decay in binary pulsar orbital periods, with sensitivity to fermion masses ≳50 eV and example upper bounds around 1 keV from Milky Way data.

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Showing 8 of 8 citing papers.