Gravitational Waves as a Probe of Particle Dark Matter

Abstract

Galactic dark matter (DM) particles, having non-gravitational interactions with nucleons, can interact with stellar constituents and eventually become captured within stars. Over the lifetime of the celestial body, these non-annihilating, heavy DM particles may accumulate and eventually form a comparable stellar mass black hole (BH), referred to as a Transmuted Black Hole (TBH). We investigate how current gravitational wave (GW) experiments could detect such particle DM through the presence of low-mass TBHs, which cannot form via standard stellar evolution. Different stellar objects (compact and non-compact) provide laboratories across DM-nucleon interaction regimes, offering insight into DM's mass and its non-gravitational properties.