分类： 天文学 >> 天文学 提交时间： 2023-02-19
Xiao Xue
Zi-Qing Xia
Xingjiang Zhu
Yue Zhao
Jing Shu
Qiang Yuan
N. D. Ramesh Bhat
Andrew D. Cameron
Shi Dai
Yi Feng
Boris Goncharov
George Hobbs
Eric Howard
Richard N. Manchester
Aditya Parthasarathy
Daniel J. Reardon
Christopher J. Russell
Ryan M. Shannon
Renée Spiewak
Nithyanandan Thyagarajan
摘要： The nature of dark matter remains obscure in spite of decades of experimental efforts. The mass of dark matter candidates can span a wide range, and its coupling with the Standard Model sector remains uncertain. All these unknowns make the etection of dark matter extremely challenging. Ultralight dark matter, with $m \sim10^{-22}$ eV, is proposed to reconcile the disagreements between observations and predictions from simulations of small-scale structures in the cold dark matter paradigm, while remaining consistent with other observations. Because of its large de Broglie wavelength and large local occupation number within galaxies, ultralight dark matter behaves like a coherently oscillating background field with an oscillating frequency dependent on its mass. If the dark matter particle is a spin-1 dark photon, such as the $U(1)_B$ or $U(1)_{B-L}$ gauge boson, it can induce an external oscillating force and lead to displacements of test masses. Such an effect would be observable in the form of periodic variations in the arrival times of radio pulses from highly stable millisecond pulsars. In this study, we search for evidence of ultralight dark photon dark matter (DPDM) using 14-year high-precision observations of 26 pulsars collected with the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array. While no statistically significant signal is found, we place constraints on coupling constants for the $U(1)_B$ and $U(1)_{B-L}$ DPDM. Compared with other experiments, the limits on the dimensionless coupling constant $\epsilon$ achieved in our study are improved by up to two orders of magnitude when the dark photon mass is smaller than $3\times10^{-22}$~eV ($10^{-22}$~eV) for the $U(1)_{B}$ ($U(1)_{B-L}$) scenario.
分类： 天文学 >> 天文学 提交时间： 2023-02-19
Xiao Xue
Ligong Bian
Jing Shu
Qiang Yuan
Xingjiang Zhu
N. D. Ramesh Bhat
Shi Dai
Yi Feng
Boris Goncharov
George Hobbs
Eric Howard
Richard N. Manchester
Christopher J. Russell
Daniel J. Reardon
Ryan M. Shannon
Renée Spiewak
Nithyanandan Thyagarajan
Jingbo Wang
摘要： A cosmological first-order phase transition is expected to produce a stochastic gravitational wave background. If the phase transition temperature is on the MeV scale, the power spectrum of the induced stochastic gravitational waves peaks around nanohertz frequencies, and can thus be probed with high-precision pulsar timing observations. We search for such a stochastic gravitational wave background with the latest data set of the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array. We find no evidence for a Hellings-Downs spatial correlation as expected for a stochastic gravitational wave background. Therefore, we present constraints on first-order phase transition model parameters. Our analysis shows that pulsar timing is particularly sensitive to the low-temperature ($T \sim 1 - 100$ MeV) phase transition with a duration $(\beta/H_*)^{-1}\sim 10^{-2}-10^{-1}$ and therefore can be used to constrain the dark and QCD phase transitions.
分类： 天文学 >> 天文学 提交时间： 2023-02-19
Yu-Mei Wu
Zu-Cheng Chen
Qing-Guo Huang
Xingjiang Zhu
N. D. Ramesh Bhat
Yi Feng
George Hobbs
Richard N. Manchester
Christopher J. Russell
R. M. Shannon
摘要： Composed of ultralight bosons, fuzzy dark matter provides an intriguing solution to challenges that the standard cold dark matter model encounters on sub-galactic scales. The ultralight dark matter with mass $m\sim10^{-23} \rm{eV}$ will induce a periodic oscillation in gravitational potentials with a frequency in the nanohertz band, leading to observable effects in the arrival times of radio pulses from pulsars. Unlike scalar dark matter, pulsar timing signals induced by the vector dark matter are dependent on the oscillation direction of the vector fields. In this work, we search for ultralight vector dark matter in the mass range of $[2\times 10^{-24}, 2\times 10^{-22}]{\rm{eV}}$ through its gravitational effect in the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array (PPTA) second data release. Since no statistically significant detection is made, we place $95\%$ upper limits on the local dark matter density as $\rho_{\rm{\tiny{VF}}} \lesssim 5{\rm{GeV/cm^{3}}}$ for $m\lesssim 10^{-23}{\rm{eV}}$. As no preferred direction is found for the vector dark matter, these constraints are comparable to those given by the scalar dark matter search with an earlier 12-year data set of PPTA.
分类： 天文学 >> 天文学 提交时间： 2023-02-19
Xiao Xue
Ligong Bian
Jing Shu
Qiang Yuan
Xingjiang Zhu
N. D. Ramesh Bhat
Shi Dai
Yi Feng
Boris Goncharov
George Hobbs
Eric Howard
Richard N. Manchester
Christopher J. Russell
Daniel J. Reardon
Ryan M. Shannon
Renée Spiewak
Nithyanandan Thyagarajan
Jingbo Wang
摘要： A cosmological first-order phase transition is expected to produce a stochastic gravitational wave background. If the phase transition temperature is on the MeV scale, the power spectrum of the induced stochastic gravitational waves peaks around nanohertz frequencies, and can thus be probed with high-precision pulsar timing observations. We search for such a stochastic gravitational wave background with the latest data set of the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array. We find no evidence for a Hellings-Downs spatial correlation as expected for a stochastic gravitational wave background. Therefore, we present constraints on first-order phase transition model parameters. Our analysis shows that pulsar timing is particularly sensitive to the low-temperature ($T \sim 1 - 100$ MeV) phase transition with a duration $(\beta/H_*)^{-1}\sim 10^{-2}-10^{-1}$ and therefore can be used to constrain the dark and QCD phase transitions.
分类： 天文学 >> 天文学 提交时间： 2023-02-19
Yu-Mei Wu
Zu-Cheng Chen
Qing-Guo Huang
Xingjiang Zhu
N. D. Ramesh Bhat
Yi Feng
George Hobbs
Richard N. Manchester
Christopher J. Russell
R. M. Shannon
摘要： Composed of ultralight bosons, fuzzy dark matter provides an intriguing solution to challenges that the standard cold dark matter model encounters on sub-galactic scales. The ultralight dark matter with mass $m\sim10^{-23} \rm{eV}$ will induce a periodic oscillation in gravitational potentials with a frequency in the nanohertz band, leading to observable effects in the arrival times of radio pulses from pulsars. Unlike scalar dark matter, pulsar timing signals induced by the vector dark matter are dependent on the oscillation direction of the vector fields. In this work, we search for ultralight vector dark matter in the mass range of $[2\times 10^{-24}, 2\times 10^{-22}]{\rm{eV}}$ through its gravitational effect in the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array (PPTA) second data release. Since no statistically significant detection is made, we place $95\%$ upper limits on the local dark matter density as $\rho_{\rm{\tiny{VF}}} \lesssim 5{\rm{GeV/cm^{3}}}$ for $m\lesssim 10^{-23}{\rm{eV}}$. As no preferred direction is found for the vector dark matter, these constraints are comparable to those given by the scalar dark matter search with an earlier 12-year data set of PPTA.
分类： 天文学 >> 天文学 提交时间： 2023-02-19
Małgorzata Curyło
Timothy T. Pennucci
Matthew Bailes
N. D. Ramesh Bhat
Andrew D. Cameron
Shi Dai
George Hobbs
Agastya Kapur
Richard N. Manchester
Rami Mandow
Matthew T. Miles
Christopher J. Russell
Daniel J. Reardon
Ryan M. Shannon
Renée Spiewak
Andrew Zic
Xing-Jiang Zhu
摘要： In 2018 an ultra-wide-bandwidth low-frequency (UWL) receiver was installed on the 64-m Parkes Radio Telescope enabling observations with an instantaneous frequency coverage from 704 to 4032 MHz. Here, we present the analysis of a three-year data set of 35 millisecond pulsars observed with the UWL by the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array (PPTA), using wideband timing methods. The two key differences compared to typical narrow-band methods are, firstly, generation of two-dimensional templates accounting for pulse shape evolution with frequency and, secondly, simultaneous measurements of the pulse time-of-arrival (ToA) and dispersion measure (DM). This is the first time that wideband timing has been applied to a uniform data set collected with a single large-fractional bandwidth receiver, for which such techniques were originally developed. As a result of our study, we present a set of profile evolution models and new timing solutions including initial noise analysis. Precision of our ToA and DM measurements is in the range of 0.005 $-$ 2.08 $\mu$s and (0.043$-$14.24)$\times10^{-4}$ cm$^{-3}$ pc, respectively, with 94% of the pulsars achieving a median ToA uncertainty of less than 1 $\mu$s.
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