Impact of flavor condensate dark matter on accretion disk luminosity in spherical spacetimes

Abstract We investigate the impact of dark matter, under the form of a fermion condensate, on the properties of accretion disks, in a spherically-symmetric and static background. We focus on a class of models where dark matter originates from a mass mixing among neutrino fields and compute how the total potential is modified accordingly. We find a Yukawa correction to the Newtonian potential. Hence, adopting the Novikov–Thorne formalism, we compute the corresponding disk-integrated luminosity profiles and, assuming a constant mass accretion rate, constituted solely by baryonic matter, we find non-negligible deviations as compared to the standard Schwarzschild case. Afterwards, we discuss physical consequences of our model with respect to recent literature and we conclude that using our results can be useful to distinguish among candidates of dark matter. Indeed, our findings suggest that incoming high-precision observations of accretion disk spectra may provide a tool to probe dark matter’s nature under the form of particles, extended theories of gravity or condensates.