Secondary accretion of dark matter in intermediate mass-ratio inspirals: Dark-matter dynamics and gravitational-wave phase

Abstract

When particle dark matter is bound gravitationally around a massive black hole in sufficiently high densities, the dark matter will affect the rate of inspiral of a secondary compact object that forms a binary with the massive black hole. In this paper, we revisit previous estimates of the impact of dark-matter accretion by black-hole secondaries on the emitted gravitational waves. We identify a region of parameter space of binaries for which estimates of the accretion were too large (specifically, because the dark-matter distribution was assumed to be unchanging throughout the process, and the secondary black hole accreted more mass in dark matter than that enclosed within the orbit of the secondary). To restore consistency in these scenarios, we propose and implement a method to remove dark-matter particles from the distribution function when they are accreted by the secondary. This new feedback procedure then satisfies mass conservation, and when evolved with physically reasonable initial data, the mass accreted by the secondary no longer exceeds the mass enclosed within its orbital radius. Comparing the simulations with accretion feedback to those without this feedback, including feedback leads to a smaller gravitational-wave dephasing from binaries in which only the effects of dynamical friction are being modeled. Nevertheless, the dephasing can be hundreds to almost a thousand gravitational-wave cycles, an amount that should allow the effects of accretion to be inferred from gravitational-wave measurements of these systems.

24 pages, 6 figures; v2: fixed typos, matches version published in PRD

References in corpus (11)

• GWTC-3: Compact Binary Coalescences Observed by LIGO and Virgo During the Second Part of the Third Observing Run
• The NANOGrav 15-year Data Set: Evidence for a Gravitational-Wave Background
• Search for an isotropic gravitational-wave background with the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array
• The second data release from the European Pulsar Timing Array III. Search for gravitational wave signals
• Can environmental effects spoil precision gravitational-wave astrophysics?
• Gravitational waves as a probe of dark matter mini-spikes
• Disks, spikes, and clouds: distinguishing environmental effects on BBH gravitational waveforms
• Measuring the dark matter environments of black hole binaries with gravitational waves
• Circularization vs. Eccentrification in Intermediate Mass Ratio Inspirals inside Dark Matter Spikes
• Measuring dark matter spikes around primordial black holes with Einstein Telescope and Cosmic Explorer
• Comparing Accretion Disks and Dark Matter Spikes in Intermediate Mass Ratio Inspirals

Cited by in corpus (12)

• The Science of the Einstein Telescope
• Black holes surrounded by generic matter distributions: polar perturbations and energy flux
• The Lunar Gravitational-wave Antenna: Mission Studies and Science Case
• Sharpening the dark matter signature in gravitational waveforms I: Accretion and eccentricity evolution
• Sharpening the dark matter signature in gravitational waveforms II: Numerical simulations with the NbodyIMRI code
• Dark Matter Mounds: towards a realistic description of dark matter overdensities around black holes
• Probing dark-matter effects with gravitational waves using the parameterized post-Einsteinian framework
• Probing dark matter halo profiles with multi-band observations of gravitational waves
• The Impact of Dark Matter on Gravitational Wave Detection by Space-based Interferometers
• Mass and spin coevolution of black holes inspiralling through dark matter
• Generalized Perturbed Kepler Problem: Gravitational Wave Imprints from Eccentric Compact Binaries
• Gravitational memory meets astrophysical environments: exploring a new frontier through osculations