Gravitational Waves as a New Probe of Bose-Einstein Condensate Dark Matter [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1609.03939


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.

Read this paper on arXiv…

P. Dev, M. Lindner and S. Ohmer
Wed, 14 Sep 16
42/75

Comments: 7 pages, 1 figure