Leave-one-out comparison of ultralight dark matter and environmental models for pulsar-timing-array data
Phys. Rev. D 114, 023057 – Published 28 July, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/znkl-vg26
Abstract
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.
