Exploring the spin of ultralight dark matter with gravitational wave detectors

Open Access

Exploring the spin of ultralight dark matter with gravitational wave detectors

Yusuke Manita, Hiroki Takeda, Katsuki Aoki, Tomohiro Fujita, and Shinji Mukohyama

Phys. Rev. D 109, 095012 – Published 13 May 2024

Abstract

We propose a novel method for distinguishing the spin of ultralight dark matter (ULDM) using interferometric gravitational wave detectors. ULDM can be a bosonic field of spin-0, 1, or 2, and each induces distinctive signatures in signals. We find that the finite-time traveling effect causes a dominant signal for spin-0 and spin-1 ULDM, but not for spin-2. By using overlap reduction functions (ORF) of multiple detectors, we can differentiate between the spins of ULDM. Furthermore, we point out that the current constraint on the coupling constant of spin-1 ULDM to baryons becomes 30 times weaker when the finite-time light-travel effect on the ORF is taken into account.

Received 29 October 2023
Accepted 19 March 2024

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.109.095012

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)

Dark matter Gravitational waves Particle dark matter

Hypothetical fermions Hypothetical gauge bosons

Gravitational wave detectors Interferometry

Gravitation, Cosmology & Astrophysics

Authors & Affiliations

Yusuke Manita ^1,*, Hiroki Takeda ¹, Katsuki Aoki ², Tomohiro Fujita ³, and Shinji Mukohyama ^2,4

¹Department of Physics, Kyoto University, Kyoto 606-8502, Japan
²Center for Gravitational Physics and Quantum Information, Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics, Kyoto University, 606-8502, Kyoto, Japan
³Waseda Institute for Advanced Study, Shinjuku, Tokyo 169-8050, Japan
⁴Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (WPI), The University of Tokyo, 277-8583, Chiba, Japan

^*manita@tap.scphys.kyoto-u.ac.jp

Article Text

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References

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Issue

Vol. 109, Iss. 9 — 1 May 2024

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Images

Figure 1
The schematic illustration of mirrors in a gravitational wave detector. The arrows show the motion of mirrors responding to spin-2 dark matter (left) and spin-0,1 dark matter (right). The former induces differential motion, and the latter induces common motion of the mirrors.
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Figure 2
Illustration of parameters $(β, σ_{1}, σ_{2})$ on the Earth coordinate. L shaped bold lines are detector 1 and 2. $σ_{1}$ and $σ_{2}$ represent the angles between the great circles of two detectors and the bisectors of each detector, respectively. $β$ denotes the central angle between the two detectors.
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Figure 3
These figures represent the antenna pattern functions for the finite-time light traveling effects in the cross-correlation between LIGO-Hanford and LIGO-Livingston. For simplicity, both detectors are assumed to exist on the same plane, with a relative angle of $2 δ = 90 °$ . The ORFs are obtained by integrating these antenna pattern functions over $\hat{Ω}$ ; therefore, the corresponding ORFs are zero.
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Figure 4
Left: the upper bound of the coupling constant $ε_{B}^{2}$ for spin-1 ULDMs to standard model particles, derived from LIGO’s and Virgo’s O3 run data. This figure is adapted from [23]. The red line represents the constraint obtained from the cross-correlation between LIGO-Hanford and Livingston. While this analysis incorporates the finite-time traveling effect, it employed the ORF for the standard gravitational waves. We added two blue lines. Owing to the change of the ORF for the finite-time traveling effect, the lower bound (blue solid line) should be corrected to the blue dashed line. Right: the upper bound of the coupling constant $α^{2}$ for spin-2 ULDM to standard model particles. These constraints are obtained by scaling the results from the O3 data related to the upper limit of the coupling constant for spin-1 ULDM. For both plots, $f_{DP} = f_{DG} = 1$ is assumed.
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Figure 5
Expected upper bound for the coupling constants of spin-2 (upper), spin-1 (middle), and spin-0 (lower) ULDM to the standard model particles in cross-correlation search with L, H, I, V, and K. We assumed that $SNR = 1, T_{obs} = 1 yr$ . Noise power spectra are adapted from [48, 49, 50].
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Figure 6
The distinguishability between the spin-2 and spin-1 ULDM (upper) and the spin-1 and spin-0 ULDM (lower) in the cross-correlation. $f_{0} \equiv m / 2 π$ represents the frequency of the signal. Note that the steep peaks are caused by the cancellation between $B_{I J} Γ_{I J}$ and $C γ_{I J}$ in (130) [or $B_{I J}^{'} Γ_{I J}$ and $C^{'} γ_{I J}$ in (133)] at which the spin-1 (or spin-0) ULDM has no sensitivity for the HL combination.
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