Sensitivity of Space-based Gravitational-Wave Interferometers to Ultralight Bosonic Fields and Dark Matter

TL;DR

This paper evaluates how planned space-based gravitational-wave detectors like LISA, Taiji, and TianQin can detect ultralight bosonic fields, which are potential dark matter candidates, by analyzing their sensitivity to these fields.

Contribution

It derives transfer functions for TDI combinations to scalar and vector fields and estimates the detectors' sensitivities and constraints on ULBFs as dark matter.

Findings

Sensitivity curves for LISA, Taiji, TianQin.

Projected constraints on ULBF couplings.

Impact of bosonic field velocities on detection.

Abstract

Ultralight bosonic fields (ULBFs) are predicted by various theories beyond the standard model of particle physics and are viable candidates of cold dark matter. There have been increasing interests to search for the ULBFs in physical and astronomical experiments. In this paper, we investigate the sensitivity of several planned space-based gravitational-wave interferometers to ultralight scalar and vector fields. Using time-delay interferometry (TDI) to suppress the overwhelming laser frequency noise, we derive the averaged transfer functions of different TDI combinations to scalar and vector fields, and estimate the impacts of bosonic field's velocities. We obtain the sensitivity curves for LISA, Taiji and TianQin, and explore their projected constraints on the couplings between ULBFs and standard model particles, illustrating with the ULBFs as dark matter.