Gravitational Wave Birefringence from Fuzzy Dark Matter

Abstract

Gravitational wave (GW) birefringence is a remarkable phenomenon that can be used to test the parity violation in gravity. By coupling the fuzzy dark matter (FDM) scalar to the gravitational Chern-Simons term, we explore the GW birefringence effects in the FDM background. In particular, in light of the highly oscillating granular FDM structure at the galactic scale, we are led to investigating the GW propagation in the Chern-Simons gravity over the general nontrivial scalar profile, which is a natural extension of previous studies on the homogeneous and isotropic configurations. As a result, it is found that GWs of both circularly polarized modes propagate in the straight line with the speed of light, and does not show any velocity birefringence. However, when considering the imaginary part of the dispersion relation, GWs exhibit the amplitude birefringence in which one circular polarization is enhanced while the other suppressed. Due to its local nature, the FDM-induced amplitude birefringence factor only depends on the GW frequency without any reliance on the GW propagating distance, which can be used to distinguish this signal from other birefringece mechanisms. More importantly, the birefringence shows a periodic time modulation with the period directly reflecting the FDM scalar mass, which is another smoking gun for testing this model. Finally, we also study the extra-galactic FDM contribution to the GW birefringence, which is shown to be suppressed by the cosmological DM density and thus subdominant compared with the galactic counterpart.