Bosonic Dark Matter in Light of the NICER Precise Mass-Radius Measurements

Abstract

We explore the presence of self-interacting bosonic dark matter (DM) whithin neutron stars (NSs) in light of the latest mass-radius measurements of the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER). The bosonic DM is distributed in NSs as a core for DM particles with high mass, low fraction and low self-coupling constant or as a halo for particles with low mass, high fraction and high self-coupling constant leading to formation of DM admixed NSs. We focus on the evolution of the visible and dark radius of the mixed object due to DM model parameters and fractions. It is shown that DM core formation reduces the visible radius and total mass pushing them below observational limits while halo formation is in favor of the latest mass-radius constraints. Applying joint constraints for radius of 1.4M NSs and the maximum mass from NICER and LIGO/Virgo observations, we scan over the parameter space of the bosonic DM model to obtain an allowed region. It turns out that the maximum mass limit provides a more stringent constraint compare to the radius one. Our investigation allows for the exclusion of a large portion of DM fractions for sub-GeV bosons and limited the amount of accumulated DM to be less than ∼ 4% for the entire mass range at the strong coupling regime λ = π. In this paper, we introduce main features of the pulse profile corresponding to the DM admixed NS and the effect of DM halo on the light bending is considered extensively as an independent probe for the DM model. We find that the depth of minimum fluxes in the pulse profiles crucially depend on the amount of DM distributed around NS and its compactness. The current/future astrophysics missions via precise measurements of compact object properties may test the possibility of the existence of DM within NSs and break the degeneracies between different scenarios to interpret exotic observations.

Dark matter effects on hybrid star properties

“…In that sense, our study is based on a way of describing the coupling between DM and strongly interacting particles by exploring the Higgs sector of the theory. Recently, this prescription has been widely applied [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21], with the advantage of being easily implemented and treated in hadronic relativistic mean-field models. By following this method, we take for the hadronic part of the hadron-quark model, the Lagrangian density given by (1) in which ψ, σ , ω μ , and ρ μ , represent, respectively, the nucleon and the exchanged mesons σ , ω, and ρ.…”

“…In recent years, many studies on the possibility that DM can be a part of compact objects, such as neutron stars, and affect their macroscopic properties, such as masses and radii, have been considered. An admixture of DM with the hadronic matter has been extensively discussed in the literature [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21]. Along the same line, dark matter effects have been studied in quark stars [22].…”

R-modes as a new probe of dark matter in neutron stars

“…In recent years, there has been significant interest in this topic, and several investigations tried to impose constraints on DM models using astrophysical data [41,42,[60][61][62][63]. Moreover, Atreya et al [64] investigated the effect of DM shear viscosity on cosmological evolution.…”

Jeans Instability of Dissipative Self-Gravitating Bose–Einstein Condensates with Repulsive or Attractive Self-Interaction: Application to Dark Matter

“…This relativistic equation of state P ( ) was first obtained by Colpi et al [58] in the context of boson stars. It was studied in detail by Chavanis and Harko [86] in connection to general relativistic BEC stars and by Li et al [364] and Suárez and Chavanis [347] in a BECDM cosmology (see also [87,298,360,365,366] for related studies). This equation of state reduces to that of an n = 1 polytrope [see Eq.…”