Abstract

The nature of dark matter remains obscure in spite of decades of experimental efforts. The mass of dark matter candidates can span a wide range, and its coupling with the Standard Model sector remains uncertain. All these unknowns make the etection of dark matter extremely challenging. Ultralight dark matter, with $m \sim10^{-22}$ eV, is proposed to reconcile the disagreements between observations and predictions from simulations of small-scale structures in the cold dark matter paradigm, while remaining consistent with other observations. Because of its large de Broglie wavelength and large local occupation number within galaxies, ultralight dark matter behaves like a coherently oscillating background field with an oscillating frequency dependent on its mass. If the dark matter particle is a spin-1 dark photon, such as the $U(1)_B$ or $U(1)_{B-L}$ gauge boson, it can induce an external oscillating force and lead to displacements of test masses. Such an effect would be observable in the form of periodic variations in the arrival times of radio pulses from highly stable millisecond pulsars. In this study, we search for evidence of ultralight dark photon dark matter (DPDM) using 14-year high-precision observations of 26 pulsars collected with the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array. While no statistically significant signal is found, we place constraints on coupling constants for the $U(1)_B$ and $U(1)_{B-L}$ DPDM. Compared with other experiments, the limits on the dimensionless coupling constant $\epsilon$ achieved in our study are improved by up to two orders of magnitude when the dark photon mass is smaller than $3\times10^{-22}$~eV ($10^{-22}$~eV) for the $U(1)_{B}$ ($U(1)_{B-L}$) scenario.

Highlights

  • About 26% of the total energy in our presentday Universe is composed of dark matter

  • Numerical simulations of the traditional particle like cold dark matter models show that the central density profile of dark matter in dwarf galaxies is much steeper than that inferred from observed rotation curves, and the number of satellite galaxies of Milky Way-like hosts predicted from simulations is higher than that inferred from observations [2]

  • Ultralight fuzzy dark matter is proposed as an attractive candidate of dark matter in the universe which helps solve the small-scale crises of the classical cold dark matter scenario

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Summary

Introduction

About 26% of the total energy in our presentday Universe is composed of dark matter. The cold dark matter paradigm has been widely accepted since it explains most of the cosmological observations over a large span of redshift [1]. High-precision search for dark photon dark matter with the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array

Results
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