Pulsar timing can constrain primordial black holes in the LIGO mass window

Abstract

The recent discovery of gravitational waves from merging black holes has generated interest in primordial black holes as a possible component of the dark matter. In this paper, we show that pulsar timing may soon have sufficient data to constrain $1$-$1000M_{\odot }$ primordial black holes via the non-detection of a third-order Shapiro time delay as the black holes move around the Galactic halo. We present the results of a Monte Carlo simulation which suggests that future data from known pulsars may be capable of constraining the PBH density more stringently than other existing methods in the mass range ~1-30$M_{\odot }$. We find that timing new pulsars discovered using the proposed Square Kilometre Array may constrain primordial black holes in this mass range to comprise less than ~1-10% of the dark matter.

6 pages, 2 figures; published in PRD with minor revision (no changes to results)

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Cited by in corpus (17)

• Cosmic microwave background limits on accreting primordial black holes
• The merger rate of primordial-black-hole binaries
• Constraints on Earth-mass primordial black holes from OGLE 5-year microlensing events
• CMB bounds on disk-accreting massive Primordial Black Holes
• Stochastic gravitational waves associated with the formation of primordial black holes
• Pulsar Timing Probes of Primordial Black Holes and Subhalos
• Probing Small-Scale Power Spectra with Pulsar Timing Arrays
• Cosmological implications of Primordial Black Holes
• Bayesian Forecasts for Dark Matter Substructure Searches with Mock Pulsar Timing Data
• Milky Way Accelerometry via Millisecond Pulsar Timing
• Dark Matter Microhalos in the Solar Neighborhood: Pulsar Timing Signatures of Early Matter Domination
• Astrophysical Observations of a Dark Matter-Baryon Fifth Force
• Astrometric Gravitational-Wave Detection via Stellar Interferometry
• Searching for Dark Clumps with Gravitational-Wave Detectors
• Detecting Dark Compact Objects in Gaia DR4: A Data Analysis Pipeline for Transient Astrometric Lensing Searches
• Detecting gravitational signatures of dark matter with atom gradiometers
• Physics beyond the Standard Model with the DSA-2000