Pulsar kicks in ultralight dark matter background induced by neutrino oscillation

TL;DR

This paper explores how ultralight dark matter backgrounds influence neutrino oscillations and asymmetric neutrino emission, potentially explaining pulsar kicks and producing detectable gravitational wave signals.

Contribution

It introduces a resonance condition for active-sterile neutrino oscillations in ultralight dark matter, linking dark matter parameters to pulsar velocities and gravitational wave signals.

Findings

Ultralight dark matter can induce neutrino dispersion relations affecting pulsar kicks.

Resonance conditions for active-sterile neutrino oscillations are derived in this context.

Predicted gravitational memory signals could be detected by future gravitational wave observatories.

Abstract

The interaction of neutrinos with ultralight scalar and vector dark matter backgrounds induce a modification of the neutrino dispersion relation. The effects of this modification are reviewed in the framework of asymmetric emission of neutrinos from the supernova core, and, in turn, of pulsar kicks. We consider the neutrino oscillations, focusing in particular to active-sterile conversion. The ultralight dark matter induced neutrino dispersion relation contains a term of the form $\delta {\bf \Omega}\cdot \hat{{\bf{p}}}$, where $\delta {\bf \Omega}$ is related to the ultralight dark matter field and $\hat{{\bf p}}$ is the unit vector along the direction of neutrino momentum. The relative orientation of ${\bf p}$ with respect to $\delta {\bf \Omega}$ affects the mechanism for the generation of the observed pulsar velocities. We obtain the resonance condition for the active-sterile neutrino oscillation in ultralight dark matter background and calculate the star parameters in the resonance surface so that both ultralight scalar and vector dark matter backgrounds can explain the observed pulsar kicks. The asymmetric emission of neutrinos in presence of ultralight dark matter background results gravitational memory signal which can be probed from the future gravitational wave detectors such as adLIGO (advanced LIGO), adVIRGO (advanced VIRGO), DECIGO (DECi-hertz Interferometer Gravitational wave Observatory), BBO (Big Bang Observer), and ET (Einstein Telescope). We also establish a relation between the ultralight dark matter parameters and the Lorentz and CPT invariance violation parameters.