Gravitational Waves as a New Probe of Bose-Einstein Condensate Dark Matter
Abstract
There exists a class of ultralight Dark Matter (DM) models which could form a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) in the early universe and behave as a single coherent wave instead of individual particles in galaxies. We show that a generic BEC DM halo intervening along the line of sight of a gravitational wave (GW) signal could induce an observable change in the speed of GW, with the effective refractive index depending only on the mass and self-interaction of the constituent DM particles and the GW frequency. Hence, we propose to use the deviation in the speed of GW as a new probe of the BEC DM parameter space. With a multi-messenger approach to GW astronomy and/or with extended sensitivity to lower GW frequencies, the entire BEC DM parameter space can be effectively probed by our new method in the near future.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1609.03939,
title = {Gravitational Waves as a New Probe of Bose-Einstein Condensate Dark Matter},
author = {P. S. Bhupal Dev and Manfred Lindner and Sebastian Ohmer},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1609.03939},
year = {2017}
}
Comments
8 pages, 1 figure; minor changes, version published in Phys. Lett. B