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The abundance of massive primordial black holes has historically been constrained by dynamical probes. Since these objects can participate in hard few-body scattering processes, they can readily transfer energy to stellar systems and, in particular, disrupt wide binaries. However, disruption is not the only possible outcome of such few-body processes. Primordial black holes could also participate in exchange processes, in which one component of a binary system is ejected and replaced by the black hole itself. In this case, the remaining object in the binary would dynamically appear to have an invisible companion. We study the rate of exchange processes for primordial black holes as a component of dark matter and evaluate possible mechanisms for detecting such binaries. We find that many such binaries plausibly exist in the Solar neighborhood and show that this process can account for observed binary systems whose properties run counter to the predictions of isolated binary evolution. 

Abstract The exploration of dark sector interactions via gravitational waves (GWs) from binary inspirals has been a subject of recent interest. We study dark forces using extreme mass ratio inspirals (EMRIs), pointing out two issues of interest. Firstly, the innermost stable circular orbit (ISCO) of the EMRI, which sets the characteristic length scale of the system and hence the dark force range to which it exhibits enhanced sensitivity, probes force mediator masses that complement those studied with supermassive black hole (SMBH) or neutron star binaries. The LISA mission (the proposedμAres detector) will probe mediators with massesm_V∼ 10^-16  eV (m_V∼ 10^-18  eV), corresponding to ISCOs of 10⁶M_⊙(10⁸M_⊙) central SMBHs. Secondly, while the sensitivity to dark couplings is typically limited by the uncertainty in the binary component masses, independent mass measurements of the central SMBH through reverberation mapping campaigns or the motion of dynamical tracers enable one to break this degeneracy. Our results therefore highlight the necessity for coordinated studies, loosely referred to as “multimessenger”, between futureμHz- mHz GW observatories and ongoing and forthcoming SMBH mass measurement campaigns, including OzDES-RM, SDSS-RM, and SDSS-V Black Hole Mapper.