Binary Pulsars as probes for Spin-2 Ultralight Dark Matter

TL;DR

This paper explores how binary pulsars can be used to detect or constrain ultra-light spin-2 dark matter by analyzing how its oscillations affect binary system dynamics, potentially revealing dark matter properties.

Contribution

It introduces the idea of using binary pulsar timing to probe spin-2 ultra-light dark matter and estimates current data's sensitivity to the coupling strength.

Findings

Current timing data can constrain the dark matter coupling strength to about 10^{-5}.

Resonant effects occur for dark matter masses between 10^{-23}eV and 10^{-17}eV.

Binary pulsars are effective probes for ultra-light spin-2 dark matter.

Abstract

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 $\lesssim m \lesssim 10^{-17}$eV we show that current timing data could potentially constrain the universal coupling strength of dark matter to ordinary matter at the level of $\alpha \simeq 10^{-5}$.