Title: Using gravitational waves to search for dark matter

Speaker: Dr. Andrew Miller, NIKHEF, Netherland

Abstract: Gravitational-wave detectors can be used to probe the existence of ultralight dark matter and primordial black holes. Ultralight dark matter could couple to standard-model particles in the interferometer, imprinting a differential strain on the detector analogous to that induced by gravitational waves. It could also form macroscopic bose-Einstein condensates ("clouds") around rotating black holes, and emit gravitational waves as dark-matter particles annihilate on timescales of centuries, if not longer. Gravitational waves emitted by inspiraling primordial black hole binaries, in particular sub-solar ones, would be almost smoking-gun evidence for the existence of dark matter in some form. In this presentation, I will describe how we perform searches for each of these dark-matter candidates, and discuss recent results from the LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA collaborations.