Abstract
An ultralight scalar field is one of the dark matter candidates. If it couples with Standard Model particles, it oscillates mirrors in gravitational-wave detectors and generates detectable signals. We study the spectra of the signals taking into account the motion of the detectors due to the Earth's rotation/the detectors' orbital motion around the Sun and formulate a suitable data-analysis method to detect it. We find that our method can improve the existing constraints given by fifth-force experiments on one of the scalar field's coupling constants by a factor of $\sim 30$, $\sim 100$ and $\sim 350$ for $m_\phi = 2 \times 10^{-17}~\mathrm{eV},~10^{-14}~\mathrm{eV}$ and $10^{-12}~\mathrm{eV}$ respectively, where $m_\phi$ is the scalar field's mass. Our study demonstrates that experiments with gravitational-wave detectors play a complementary role to that Equivalence Principle tests do.
Highlights
Weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) are promising candidates of dark matter, null results from various experiments [1,2,3,4] cast doubt on weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs)
We focus on the case where the scalar field has nonminimal parity-even couplings with Standard Model particles and study the spectra of the signals, taking into account the motion of the detectors due to the Earth’s rotation/the detectors’ orbital motion around the Sun
Since the sensitivities of both data-analysis methods are of the same order, we focus on the former method utilizing the incoherent sum of the spectra
Summary
Weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) are promising candidates of dark matter, null results from various experiments [1,2,3,4] cast doubt on WIMPs. The oscillation of the scalar field that couples with the SM particles causes time variations of physical constants such as the proton mass and the fine-structure constant They produce the time variations of the atomic transitions as well as the oscillatory force on bodies, from which the constraint on the coupling to the SM particles can be obtained [18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27]. Under the assumption that an ultralight scalar field comprises all dark matter and it weakly couples to the SM particles, we investigate the possibility of detecting such a field with gravitational-wave (GW) detectors.
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