Can Orbital Decay of Accreting Binary Pulsars Probe Dark Matter?

TL;DR

This paper explores how dark matter accretion onto binary pulsars in dense environments could influence their orbital decay, offering a potential method to probe dark matter properties with future observations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to use orbital decay of binary pulsars in high dark matter density regions to investigate dark matter microphysics.

Findings

Dark matter accretion increases pulsar system mass.

Current data cannot constrain dark matter particle properties.

Future observations near galactic centers could provide new insights.

Abstract

The merger of binary pulsars in dark matter (DM)-rich environments can result in DM particle accretion, leading to an increase in the individual pulsar masses. In this work, we investigate the effects of DM accretion on the change in orbital period rate of binary pulsars. Our analysis reveals that while DM accretion increases the system's mass, it may also modify the orbital evolution by enhancing the orbital decay rate. By comparing our results with existing binary pulsar data near Earth's location, we report that the current DM accretion rate is insufficient to place meaningful constraints on DM particle properties. However, we demonstrate that future observations of pulsar mergers in the high DM-density environment of the galactic center could offer a unique opportunity to probe DM microphysics through this mechanism.