Université de GenèveDépartement de Physique ThéoriqueCAP Genève

Self-interacting dark matter impact on pulsar timing array observations

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.

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Département de Physique Théorique
Université de Genève
24, quai Ernest Ansermet
1211 Genève 4
Switzerland
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