Binary pulsars as probes for spin-2 ultralight dark matter

Abstract

Binary pulsars can be excellent probes of ultra-light dark matter. We consider the scenario where the latter is represented by a spin-2 field. The coherent oscillations of the dark matter field perturb the dynamics of binary systems, leading to secular effects for masses that resonate with the binary systems. For the range 10-23 eV ≤ m ≤ 10-17 eV we show that current timing data could potentially constrain the universal coupling strength of dark matter to ordinary matter at the level of α ≈ 10-5