Probing Dark Matter Spike with Gravitational Waves from Early EMRIs in the Milky Way Center

Abstract: Cold dark matter may form dense structures around supermassive black holes (SMBHs), significantly influencing their local environments. These dense regions are ideal sites for the formation of extreme mass-ratio inspirals (EMRIs), in which stellar-mass compact objects gradually spiral into SMBH, emitting gravitational waves (GWs). Space-based gravitational-wave (GW) observatories such as LISA and Taiji will be sensitive to these signals, including early-stage EMRIs (E-EMRIs) that persist in the low-frequency band for extended periods. In this work, we investigate the impact of dark matter-induced dynamical friction on E-EMRIs in the Milky Way Center, model its effect on the trajectory, and calculate the resulting modifications to the GW spectrum. Our analysis suggests that this influence might be sizable and lead to detectable deviations in the spectrum, namely suppression at low frequencies and enhancement at high frequencies, therefore providing a potential probe for dark matter with future GW detectors in space, such as LISA and Taiji.