Continuous Gravitational Waves: A New Window to Look for Heavy Non-annihilating Dark Matter

Understand

Sun-like stars can transmute into comparable mass black holes by steadily accumulating heavy non-annihilating dark matter particles over the course of their lives.

• If such stars form in binary systems, they could give rise to quasi-monochromatic, persistent gravitational waves, commonly known as continuous gravitational waves, as they inspiral toward one another.
• We demonstrate that next-generation space-based detectors, e.g., Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) and Big Bang Observer (BBO), can provide novel constraints on dark matter parameters (dark matter mass and its interaction cross-section with the nucleons) by probing gravitational waves from transmuted Sun-like stars that are in close binaries.
• Our projected constraints depend on several astrophysical uncertainties, nevertheless, are competitive with the existing constraints obtained from cosmological measurements as well as terrestrial direct searches, demonstrating a notable science-case for these space-based gravitational wave detectors as probes of particle dark matter.