Probing ultralight tensor dark matter with the stochastic gravitational-wave background from advanced LIGO and Virgo's first three observing runs

Abstract

Ultralight bosons are attractive dark-matter candidates and appear in various scenarios beyond standard model. They can induce superradiant instabilities around spinning black holes (BHs), extracting the energy and angular momentum from BHs, and then dissipate through monochromatic gravitational radiation, which become promising sources of gravitational wave detectors. In this letter, we focus on massive tensor fields coupled to BHs and compute the stochastic gravitational wave backgrounds emitted by these sources. We then undertake a search for this background within the data from LIGO/Virgo O1∼O3 runs. Our analysis reveals no discernible evidence of such signals, allowing us to impose stringent limits on the mass range of tensor bosons. Specifically, we exclude the existence of tensor bosons with masses ranging from 4.0 × 10-14 to 2.0 × 10-12 eV at 95% confidence level.