Binary pulsars as probes for spin-2 ultralight dark matter

ARMALEO, JUAN MANUEL; NACIR, DIANA LÓPEZ; URBAN, FEDERICO R.

JOURNAL OF COSMOLOGY AND ASTROPARTICLE PHYSICS

IOP PUBLISHING LTD

Año: 2020 vol. 2020 p. 53 - 53

1475-7516

Binary pulsars can be excellent probes of ultra-light dark matter. We consider the scenario where the latter is represented by a spin-2 field. The coherent oscillations of the dark matter field perturb the dynamics of binary systems, leading to secular effects for masses that resonate with the binary systems. For the range 10−23 eV 􏰁 m 􏰁 10−17 eV we show that current timing data could potentially constrain the universal coupling strength of dark matter to ordinary matter at the level of α ≃ 10−5.