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arXiv · 1811.06387

Waves from the Centre: Probing PBH and other Macroscopic Dark Matter with LISA

Florian Kuhnel·Andrew Matas·Glenn D. Starkman·Katherine Freese
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Abstract

A significant fraction of cosmological dark matter can be formed by very dense macroscopic objects, for example primordial black holes. Gravitational waves offer a promising way to probe these kinds of dark-matter candidates, in a parameter space region that is relatively untested by electromagnetic observations. In this work we consider an ensemble of macroscopic dark matter with masses in the range $10^{-13}$ - $1\,M_{\odot}$ orbiting a super-massive black hole. While the strain produced by an individual dark-matter particle will be very small, gravitational waves emitted by a large number of such objects will add incoherently and produce a stochastic gravitational-wave background. We show that LISA can be a formidable machine for detecting the stochastic background of such objects orbiting the black hole in the centre of the Milky Way, Sgr\.${\rm A}^{\!*}$, if a dark-matter spike of the type originally predicted by Gondolo and Silk forms near the central black hole.

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Florian Kuhnel, Andrew Matas, Glenn D. Starkman, Katherine Freese. 2018-11-14. Waves from the Centre: Probing PBH and other Macroscopic Dark Matter with LISA. https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc%2Fs10052-020-8183-4

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