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COMPULSE

Research group on Dark Matter searches with Pulsar Experiments

Chasing Obscure Matter with PULSar Experiments' (COMPULSE) is a Max Planck Research Group in Astrophysics, hosted by the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) from the 1st of December, 2025. The group is led by Dr. Nataliya Porayko, and runs for a duration of 6 years.

Dark matter is one of the most pressing problems in modern astrophysics, perplexing the minds of the scientific community for almost a century. Originally, the need for the “missing mass” was postulated by Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky in the 1930s after observing the galaxies in the Coma galaxy cluster moving too quickly. Since then, a considerable amount of evidence of the non-luminous matter, or at least a new degree of freedom in the Lagrangian, has been accumulated on the various astrophysical scales. Despite of its abundance, dark matter hasn’t yet been found in direct-search experiments and its nature is still debatable. Pulsars, which are highly magnetised neutron stars, could be instrumental in unlocking the solution to this enigma.

Mindmap of different dark matter models — Figure 1: Adapted from Bertone, G. & Tait, T. M. P.: A new era in the search for dark matter. Nature 562, 2018, Fig. 1

Figure 1: Adapted from Bertone, G. & Tait, T. M. P.: A new era in the search for dark matter. Nature 562, 2018, Fig. 1

The main goal of the COMPULSE project is to exploit all the wealth of pulsar data along with the most modern data analysis strategies to probe some of the viable dark matter models. Pulsar spectroscopy can be used to detect QCD axions, which were originally introduced to resolve the CP problem in quantum chromodynamics (QCD). Ultra-light axions, which are generalisations of QCD axions in the low-mass regime, can be effectively probed with pulsar polarimetry. Finally, pulsar timing offers unparalleled opportunity to observe the primordial Universe up to the epoch of inflation and probe physics beyond the Standard Model. In particular, arrays of the most stably rotating pulsars distributed across the sky, known as pulsar timing arrays, can uniquely constrain the small-scale primordial power spectrum involved in the production of primordial black holes, which may comprise all or a fraction of the dark matter energy density. The dark matter candidates that will be investigated with COMPULSE are highlighted in purple in Figure 1. This list is nicely complemented by the dark matter models which have been a subject of long-lasting research at the MPIfR (in green).

Within the COMPULSE project, the developed methods of dark matter searches will be directly applied to the actual data gathered with the world’s most ambitious radio instruments. These include the largest European 100-m dish radio telescope in Effelsberg, and LOw-Frequency ARray (LOFAR), partially operated by the MPIfR. The timeline of the project nicely overlaps with the emergence of newly developed radio facilities, such as MeerKAT+, LOFAR2.0 and the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), which will further boost the sensitivity towards dark matter searches. It's time to go hunting.