Event Details

A dark matter (DM) halo intervening along the line of sight of a gravitational wave (GW) signal could induce a change in the speed of GW. We show that this change of speed is observable with the current LIGO sensitivity for a class of self-interacting ultralight DM models, where the DM particles could form a Bose-Einstein condensate in the early universe and behave as a single coherent wave instead of individual particles in galaxies. With a multi-messenger approach to GW astronomy and/or with extended sensitivity to lower GW frequencies, this will provide a new effective probe of DM in the near future.

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