分类: 天文学 >> 天文学 提交时间: 2023-02-19
摘要: The nature of dark matter remains obscure in spite of decades of experimental efforts. The mass of dark matter candidates can span a wide range, and its coupling with the Standard Model sector remains uncertain. All these unknowns make the etection of dark matter extremely challenging. Ultralight dark matter, with $m \sim10^{-22}$ eV, is proposed to reconcile the disagreements between observations and predictions from simulations of small-scale structures in the cold dark matter paradigm, while remaining consistent with other observations. Because of its large de Broglie wavelength and large local occupation number within galaxies, ultralight dark matter behaves like a coherently oscillating background field with an oscillating frequency dependent on its mass. If the dark matter particle is a spin-1 dark photon, such as the $U(1)_B$ or $U(1)_{B-L}$ gauge boson, it can induce an external oscillating force and lead to displacements of test masses. Such an effect would be observable in the form of periodic variations in the arrival times of radio pulses from highly stable millisecond pulsars. In this study, we search for evidence of ultralight dark photon dark matter (DPDM) using 14-year high-precision observations of 26 pulsars collected with the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array. While no statistically significant signal is found, we place constraints on coupling constants for the $U(1)_B$ and $U(1)_{B-L}$ DPDM. Compared with other experiments, the limits on the dimensionless coupling constant $\epsilon$ achieved in our study are improved by up to two orders of magnitude when the dark photon mass is smaller than $3\times10^{-22}$~eV ($10^{-22}$~eV) for the $U(1)_{B}$ ($U(1)_{B-L}$) scenario.
分类: 天文学 >> 天文学 提交时间: 2023-02-19
摘要: In 2018 an ultra-wide-bandwidth low-frequency (UWL) receiver was installed on the 64-m Parkes Radio Telescope enabling observations with an instantaneous frequency coverage from 704 to 4032 MHz. Here, we present the analysis of a three-year data set of 35 millisecond pulsars observed with the UWL by the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array (PPTA), using wideband timing methods. The two key differences compared to typical narrow-band methods are, firstly, generation of two-dimensional templates accounting for pulse shape evolution with frequency and, secondly, simultaneous measurements of the pulse time-of-arrival (ToA) and dispersion measure (DM). This is the first time that wideband timing has been applied to a uniform data set collected with a single large-fractional bandwidth receiver, for which such techniques were originally developed. As a result of our study, we present a set of profile evolution models and new timing solutions including initial noise analysis. Precision of our ToA and DM measurements is in the range of 0.005 $-$ 2.08 $\mu$s and (0.043$-$14.24)$\times10^{-4}$ cm$^{-3}$ pc, respectively, with 94% of the pulsars achieving a median ToA uncertainty of less than 1 $\mu$s.