Searching for Dark Photon Dark Matter with Gravitational-Wave Detectors

Open Access

Searching for Dark Photon Dark Matter with Gravitational-Wave Detectors

Aaron Pierce, Keith Riles, and Yue Zhao

Phys. Rev. Lett. 121, 061102 – Published 8 August 2018

Abstract

If dark matter stems from the background of a very light gauge boson, this gauge boson could exert forces on test masses in gravitational wave detectors, resulting in displacements with a characteristic frequency set by the gauge boson mass. We outline a novel search strategy for such dark matter, assuming the dark photon is the gauge boson of $U (1)_{B}$ or $U (1)_{B - L}$ . We show that both ground-based and future space-based gravitational wave detectors have the capability to make a $5 σ$ discovery in unexplored parameter regimes.

Received 7 February 2018
Revised 2 May 2018

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.061102

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP³.

Published by the American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Gravitational waves Particle astrophysics Particle dark matter

Gravitation, Cosmology & AstrophysicsParticles & Fields

Authors & Affiliations

Aaron Pierce¹, Keith Riles², and Yue Zhao^1,3,4

¹Leinweber Center for Theoretical Physics, Department of Physics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109, USA
²Department of Physics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109, USA
³Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah 84112, USA
⁴Tsung-Dao Lee Institute, and Department of Physics and Astronomy, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China