Cosmological Gravitational Waves from Ultralight Vector Dark Matter
arXiv:2604.21080 · doi:10.1103/dfl4-b4hv
Abstract
We compute the abundance of cosmological gravitational waves produced during the evolution of an ultralight vector (spin-1) dark matter field. A homogeneous background vector field breaks spatial isotropy, requiring a Bianchi I geometry and inducing a mixing between the scalar, vector, and tensor perturbation sectors. We derive the perturbation equations in this background and show that, as a consequence of this mixing, scalar perturbations act as a source of tensor modes, generating a stochastic GW background. The production and cosmological evolution of these gravitational waves are implemented in \texttt{class.VFDM}, a modified version of \texttt{CLASS}, from which we obtain the present-day spectrum.
15 pages, 2 figures
References in corpus (23)
- The Cosmic Linear Anisotropy Solving System (CLASS) II: Approximation schemes
- Axion Cosmology
- Gravitational Wave Experiments and Early Universe Cosmology
- BICEP / Keck XIII: Improved Constraints on Primordial Gravitational Waves using Planck, WMAP, and BICEP/Keck Observations through the 2018 Observing Season
- Gravitational-wave sensitivity curves
- Strong bound on canonical ultra-light axion dark matter from the Lyman-alpha forest
- Adiabatic Modes in Cosmology
- Damping of Tensor Modes in Cosmology
- Axion dark matter, solitons, and the cusp-core problem
- Gravitational waves from stochastic relativistic sources: primordial turbulence and magnetic fields
- xPert: Computer algebra for metric perturbation theory
- Theory of cosmological perturbations in an anisotropic universe
- xPand: An algorithm for perturbing homogeneous cosmologies
- Constraints on primordial gravitational waves from the Cosmic Microwave Background
- Gravitational waves from self-ordering scalar fields
- Vector Coherent Oscillation Dark Matter
- Isotropy theorem for cosmological vector fields
- Viable Vector Coherent Oscillation Dark Matter
- Isotropy theorem for arbitrary-spin cosmological fields
- Relativistic viscous effects on the primordial gravitational waves spectrum
- The imprint of ultralight vector fields on gravitational wave propagation
- Ultralight vector dark matter, anisotropies and cosmological adiabatic modes
- Cosmological perturbations with ultralight vector dark matter fields: numerical implementation in CLASS