Weighing dark matter particles with gravitational waves
Abstract
It is commonly assumed that the mass of dark matter particles cannot be determined from their gravitational effects when dark matter behaves as collisionless matter. Here we show that extreme-mass-ratio inspirals observable by millihertz gravitational-wave observatories such as the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) could measure the mass of ultralight dark matter particles in sufficiently dense dark matter spikes. The separation of scales between the two black holes allows ultralight dark matter to form a collisionless density spike around the massive primary while retaining wave effects in its interaction with the stellar-mass companion. We incorporate wave-dependent accretion and dynamical friction into relativistic inspiral waveforms and jointly infer the dark matter particle mass, spike normalisation and binary parameters from simulated LISA signals. For massive black holes at the low-mass end of the LISA population (M∼ 105 M⊙), our forecasts show that particle masses spanning 10−14−10−11 eV could be measured to within an order of magnitude.
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BibTeX
@misc{vicente2026weighing,
title = {{Weighing dark matter particles with gravitational waves}},
author = {Rodrigo Vicente and Francisco Duque and Theophanes K. Karydas and Gianfranco Bertone},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.37638},
eprint = {2610.37638},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.37638},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Weighing dark matter particles with gravitational waves
AU - Rodrigo Vicente
AU - Francisco Duque
AU - Theophanes K. Karydas
AU - Gianfranco Bertone
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/27
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.37638
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.37638
AB - It is commonly assumed that the mass of dark matter particles cannot be determined from their gravitational effects when dark matter behaves as collisionless matter. Here we show that extreme-mass-ratio inspirals observable by millihertz gravitational-wave observatories such as the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) could measure the mass of ultralight dark matter particles in sufficiently dense dark matter spikes. The separation of scales between the two black holes allows ultralight dark matter to form a collisionless density spike around the massive primary while retaining wave effects in its interaction with the stellar-mass companion. We incorporate wave-dependent accretion and dynamical friction into relativistic inspiral waveforms and jointly infer the dark matter particle mass, spike normalisation and binary parameters from simulated LISA signals. For massive black holes at the low-mass end of the LISA population (M∼ 10^5 M_⊙), our forecasts show that particle masses spanning 10^−14−10^−11 eV could be measured to within an order of magnitude.
ER -