Date:
14. June 2024 - 11:45 to 13:00
Speaker:
Jim Cline (McGill University & CERN)
Mergers of supermassive black holes are a favored process to
explain stochastic gravitational waves seen by pulsar timing arrays, but
they suffer from a long-standing "final parsec problem," which causes them
to stall before reaching the stage of GW emission. We show that dynamical
friction with dark matter spikes can solve this problem, and produce
softening of the GW spectrum at low frequencies, if the DM is
self-interacting, with cross sections previously identified as
ameliorating small scale structure problems of CDM.