Relativistic signatures of scalar dark matter in extreme-mass-ratio inspirals

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Keijzer, Robrecht, Maenaut, Simon, Inchauspé, Henri, Hertog, Thomas
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Keijzer, Robrecht
Maenaut, Simon
Inchauspé, Henri
Hertog, Thomas
author_facet Keijzer, Robrecht
Maenaut, Simon
Inchauspé, Henri
Hertog, Thomas
contents We study gravitational wave emission by circular extreme-mass-ratio systems in a spherically symmetric scalar environment. Previous studies have focused on the impact of scalar radiation channels, revealing a rich structure of resonances, sharp features and floating orbits. Through the backreaction of the cloud on the metric, corrections to the gravitational sector come in at the same order. We develop the computational methods, and provide a characterization of this new, fully relativistic cloud signature. Remarkably, corrections to the polar sector can dominate all other dissipative corrections. We identify scalar field masses $Mμ\lesssim 0.12$ as the regime where polar can overtake axial and scalar channels at small separation. For small $Mμ$, vacuum dephasing is dominated mostly by conservative and polar cloud corrections, with scalar radiation acting as only a minor correction. At large $Mμ$, both terms terms are shown to be highly non-negligible. Our results therefore motivate including these relativistic signatures in beyond-vacuum EMRI templates.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_11893
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Relativistic signatures of scalar dark matter in extreme-mass-ratio inspirals
Keijzer, Robrecht
Maenaut, Simon
Inchauspé, Henri
Hertog, Thomas
General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
We study gravitational wave emission by circular extreme-mass-ratio systems in a spherically symmetric scalar environment. Previous studies have focused on the impact of scalar radiation channels, revealing a rich structure of resonances, sharp features and floating orbits. Through the backreaction of the cloud on the metric, corrections to the gravitational sector come in at the same order. We develop the computational methods, and provide a characterization of this new, fully relativistic cloud signature. Remarkably, corrections to the polar sector can dominate all other dissipative corrections. We identify scalar field masses $Mμ\lesssim 0.12$ as the regime where polar can overtake axial and scalar channels at small separation. For small $Mμ$, vacuum dephasing is dominated mostly by conservative and polar cloud corrections, with scalar radiation acting as only a minor correction. At large $Mμ$, both terms terms are shown to be highly non-negligible. Our results therefore motivate including these relativistic signatures in beyond-vacuum EMRI templates.
title Relativistic signatures of scalar dark matter in extreme-mass-ratio inspirals
topic General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.11893