Testing Non-minimally Coupled BEC Dark Matter with Gravitational Waves

TL;DR

This paper investigates how non-minimal coupling in Bose-Einstein condensate dark matter models affects gravitational wave propagation, using GW170817 data to constrain the model's parameters and oscillation behavior.

Contribution

It introduces a non-minimally coupled dark matter model based on relativistic Bose-Einstein condensates and analyzes its impact on gravitational wave speed constraints.

Findings

Constraints are tight if dark matter oscillates freely.

Constraints weaken if oscillations are damped by coupling.

Model modifies local gravity speed, testable with GW observations.

Abstract

We study the phenomenology associated to non-minimally coupled dark matter. In particular, we consider the model where the non-minimal coupling arises from the formation of relativistic Bose-Einstein condensates in high density regions of dark matter [1]. This non-minimal coupling is of Horndeski type and leads to a local modification of the speed of gravity with respect to the speed of light. Therefore we can constrain the model by using the joint detection of GW170817 and GRB170817A. We show that the constraints obtained in this way are quite tight, if the dark matter field oscillates freely, whereas they are substantially weakened, if the oscillations are damped by the non-minimal coupling.