Description
Dark matter halos may naturally lead to the formation of dark matter overdensities around black holes known as “spikes”. These environments can perturb the dynamical evolution of a companion object orbiting inside of them, and thus significantly alter the emitted gravitational waveform (GW). For extreme mass ratio inspirals (EMRIs), the accurate modelling of waveforms is key to successfully extracting information about their environments.
In this talk, I will introduce the topic, discuss what we’ve learned about modelling these systems and present some implications arising from the strong gravity of the two black holes.
