Can LIGO Detect Non-Annihilating Dark Matter?

Understand

Dark matter from the galactic halo can accumulate in neutron stars and transmute them into sub-2.5 $M_{\odot}$ black holes if the dark matter particles are heavy, stable, and have interactions with nucleons.

• We show that non-detection of gravitational waves from mergers of such low-mass black holes can constrain the interactions of non-annihilating dark matter particles with nucleons.
• We find benchmark constraints with LIGO O3 data, viz., $\sigma_{\chi n} \geq {\cal O}(10^{-47})$ cm$^2$ for bosonic DM with $m_\chi\sim$ PeV (or $m_\chi\sim$ GeV, if they can Bose-condense) and $\geq {\cal O}(10^{-46})$ cm$^2$ for fermionic DM with $m_\chi \sim 10^3$ PeV.
• These bounds depend on the priors on DM parameters and on the currently uncertain binary neutron star merger rate density.