Speaker
Description
Ultralight dark matter is an exciting alternative to the standard cold dark matter paradigm, reproducing its large scale predictions, while solving most of its potential tension with small scale observations (like the "cusp-core" and "missing satellites" problems). If dark matter is made of some new light scalar particle, relatively dense and large structures are expected to form at the center of galaxies, like solitonic cores or superradiant clouds around spinning massive black holes. These non-trivial environments may affect the evolution of black hole or neutron star binaries, opening the possibility for using future space-borne gravitational-wave observatories to probe the nature of dark matter.
In this talk I will discuss the flux of scalar particles and gravitational waves sourced by extreme mass-ratio inspirals in these environments. We use for the first time relativistic (linear) perturbation theory to compute the adiabatic evolution of the secondary orbit and study the consequent effect on their gravitational waveforms.
