
Dark Matter Microhalos in the Solar Neighborhood: Pulsar Timing Signatures of Early Matter Domination
The impressive regularity of pulsating neutron stars allow them to be used as extremely acurate "clocks" that operate on Myr or even Gyr timescales. Pulsar timing arrays have taken repeated observations of nearby MSPs over 20 Myr, looking for small deviations which may be due to local gravitational effects affecting either the neutron star environment or local solar neighborhood. We note that these arrays are quickly becoming sensitive to the enhanced dark matter substructure that is expected when the universe goes through a period of Early Matter Domination before the onset of radiation domination during big-bang nucleosynthesis. Current, or near-future, observations (20 years with approximately 70 pulsars), could begin to constrain novel EMDE parameter space -- while future studies including 200 pulsars over 40 years could raise the minimum energy floor for early matter domination as high as 150 MeV.
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