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Dark matter mounds from the collapse of supermassive stars: A general-relativistic analysis

Roberto Caiozzo1,2,*, Gianfranco Bertone3, Piero Ullio1,2,4, Rodrigo Vicente3, Bradley J. Kavanagh5, and Daniele Gaggero6

  • *Contact author: rcaiozzo@sissa.it
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Phys. Rev. D 113, 063052 – Published 25 March, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/lnhp-tffg

Abstract

Recent work has highlighted the importance of a fully relativistic treatment of the dephasing of gravitational waves induced by dark-matter overdensities in extreme mass-ratio inspirals (EMRIs). However, a general-relativistic description of the dark matter phase-space distribution is currently available only for the case of a dark matter “spike” arising from adiabatic black hole growth. Here we develop a fully general-relativistic formalism for the more realistic scenario in which a supermassive stellar progenitor collapses to a black hole and produces a shallower dark matter overdensity, or “mound.” We follow self-consistently the evolution of the supermassive star, its collapse, and the subsequent growth of the resulting black hole, together with the collisionless dark matter orbits. We find that in the regime where the collapse becomes nonadiabatic, the dark matter distribution function is significantly reshaped, with a clear depletion in the low-binding-energy region of phase space. Our results provide a more realistic prediction for the dark matter phase-space distribution around supermassive black holes, which is an essential step in using future EMRI observations to extract information about their formation history and the nature of dark matter.

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Phys. Rev. D 113, 063052– Published 25 March, 2026
  • Received 16 December 2025
  • Accepted 18 February 2026
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.

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