Leave-one-out comparison of ultralight dark matter and environmental models for pulsar-timing-array data
Previous work showed that ultralight-dark-matter solitons can provide dynamical friction for supermassive black-hole binaries, suppressing low-frequency power in the pulsar-timing-array gravitational-wave background and constraining the particle mass and effective ultralight-dark-matter fraction. Here we extend that analysis by comparing the predictive performance of four models: simplified and realistic ultralight-dark-matter implementations, a phenomenological environmental-hardening model, and a gravitational-wave-only model. We use Bayesian leave-one-out cross-validation on the five lowest pulsar-timing-array frequency bins. The phenomenological model gives the largest expected log predictive density, but its advantage over the other models is not large compared with the estimated standard errors. The current data therefore do not decisively prefer one model overall. The clearest pairwise result is within the ultralight-dark-matter framework: The simplified model outperforms the realistic implementation in all five frequency bins. Current pulsar-timing-array data are therefore compatible with ultralight-dark-matter-induced low-frequency suppression, but do not yet distinguish ultralight-dark-matter significantly from more generic environmental descriptions of supermassive-black-hole-binary evolution.
展开 ▾脉冲星计时阵列数据的超轻暗物质与环境模型的留一法比较 · 本文用贝叶斯留一法交叉验证比较了四种模型(简化/现实超轻暗物质、环境硬化、仅引力波)对脉冲星计时阵列数据的预测,发现现象学模型略优但差异不显著,且简化超轻暗物质模型在所有频段优于现实实现,表明数据兼容超轻暗物质但尚不能明确区分其与环境模型。
预印本 2026-05-07 · 刊出 2026-07-28 · 收录 2026-08-20