The Subhalo Mass Function and Ultralight Bosonic Dark Matter
Katelin Schutz
备注：
8 pages, 1 figure. v2: updated to match the version published in PRD with minor revisions (no change to results), including an additional figure to provide further context for the constraint presented here
Warm dark matter has recently become increasingly constrained by observational inferences about the low-mass end of the subhalo mass function, which would be suppressed by dark matter free streaming in the early Universe. In this work, we point out that a constraint can be placed on ultralight bosonic dark matter (often referred to as "fuzzy dark matter") based on similar considerations. Recent limits on warm dark matter from strong gravitational lensing of quasars and from fluctuations in stellar streams separately translate to a lower limit of $\sim 2.1 \times 10^{-21}$ eV on the mass of an ultralight boson comprising all dark matter. These limits are complementary to constraints on ultralight dark matter from the Lyman-$α$ forest and are subject to a completely different set of assumptions and systematic uncertainties. Taken together, these probes strongly suggest that dark matter with a mass $\sim 10^{-22}$ eV is not a viable way to reconcile differences between cold dark matter simulations and observations of structure on small scales.
Starting from the evidence that dark matter indeed exists and permeates the entire cosmos, various bounds on its properties can be estimated. Beginning with the cosmic microwave background and large scale structure, we summarize bounds on the ultralight bosonic dark matter (UBDM) mass and cosmic density. These bounds are extended to larger masses by considering galaxy formation and evolution, and the phenomenon of black hole superradiance. We then discuss the formation of different classes of UBDM compact objects including solitons/axion stars and miniclusters. Next, we consider astrophysical …
Superconducting targets have recently been proposed for the direct detection of dark matter as light as a keV, via elastic scattering off conduction electrons in Cooper pairs. Detecting such light dark matter requires sensitivity to energies as small as the superconducting gap of O(meV). Here we show that these same superconducting devices can detect much lighter DM, of meV to eV mass, via dark matter absorption on a conduction electron, followed by emission of an athermal phonon. We demonstrate the power of this setup for relic kinetically mixed hidden photons, pseudoscalars, and scalars, sho…
Tunneling and tidal stripping in multifield ultralight dark matter halos
Center for Theoretical Physics—a Leinweber Institute, Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院莱因韦伯理论物理中心）；Department of Physics, Harvard University（哈佛大学物理系）；Universidad Autonoma de Madrid（马德里自治大学）；IFT-UAM/CSIC（乌阿姆/西班牙国家科学研究委员会理论物理研究所）
Ultralight axion-like particles $m_a \sim 10^{-22}$ eV, or Fuzzy Dark Matter (FDM), behave comparably to cold dark matter (CDM) on cosmological scales and exhibit a kpc-size de Broglie wavelength capable of alleviating established (sub-)galactic-scale problems of CDM. Substructures inside an FDM halo incur gravitational potential perturbations, resulting in stellar heating sufficient to account for the Galactic disc thickening over a Hubble time, as first demonstrated by Church et al. We present a more sophisticated treatment that incorporates the full baryon and dark matter distributions of t…
We simulate the formation and evolution of ultralight bosonic dark matter halos from cosmological initial conditions. Using zoom-in techniques we are able to resolve the detailed interior structure of the halos. We observe the formation of solitonic cores and confirm the core-halo mass relation previously found by Schive et al. The cores exhibit strong quasi-normal oscillations that remain largely undamped on evolutionary timescales. On the other hand, no conclusive growth of the core mass by condensation or relaxation can be detected. In the incoherent halo surrounding the cores, the scalar f…
We study binary mergers of ultralight bosonic dark matter cores by solving the Gross-Pitaevskii-Poisson system of equations. The analysis centers on the dynamics of the relaxation process and the behavior of the configuration resulting from the merger, including the Gravitational Cooling with its corresponding emission of mass and angular momentum. The oscillations of density and size of the final configuration are characterized, indicating that for the equal mass case the dependency of the amplitude and frequency of these oscillations on the impact parameter of the pre-merger configuration is…
Ultralight bosonic particles are fascinating candidates of dark matter (DM). It behaves as classical waves in our Galaxy due to its large number density. There have been various methods proposed to search for the wave-like DM, such as methods utilizing interferometric gravitational-wave detectors. Understanding the characteristics of DM signals is crucial to extract the properties of DM from data. While the DM signal is nearly monochromatic with the angular frequency of its mass, the amplitude and phase are gradually changing due to the velocity dispersion of DMs in our Galaxy halo. The stocha…
If ultralight $(\ll$ eV), bosonic dark matter couples to right handed neutrinos, active neutrino masses and mixing angles depend on the ambient dark matter density. When the neutrino Majorana mass, induced by the dark matter background, is small compared to the Dirac mass, neutrinos are "pseudo-Dirac" fermions that undergo oscillations between nearly degenerate active and sterile states. We present a complete cosmological history for such a scenario and find severe limits from a variety of terrestrial and cosmological observables. For scalar masses in the "fuzzy" dark matter regime ($\sim 10^{…
In this work we study some features of head-on mergers of equilibrium solutions of the Gross-Pitaevskii-Poisson system that rules the dynamics of the ultralight bosonic dark matter model. The importance of equilibrium solutions is that they play the role of halo cores in structure formation simulations. We consider a given range of initial conditions in order to sample the parameter space in terms of mass ratio and head-on momentum. In each case we analyze the relaxation process induced by gravitational cooling in the high and low momentum regimes and estimate the relaxation time scales in eac…
Ultralight bosonic dark matter is expected to be able to form a cloud surrounding the supermassive black hole (SMBH) in the Galactic center. With increasing precision of the observations of the stellar kinematics around the SMBH, tiny effects from such a dark matter cloud, including its gravitational perturbation and the direct coupling with the ordinary matter may be detectable. In this work, we search for possible evidence of the scalar cloud using accurate orbital measurements of the S2 star around Sgr~A*. We solve the first order Post-Newtonian equation, considering simultaneously the exte…
Cold, ultralight ($\ll$ eV) bosonic dark matter with a misalignment abundance can induce temporal variation in the masses and couplings of Standard Model particles. We find that fast variations in neutrino oscillation parameters can lead to significantly distorted neutrino oscillations (DiNOs) and yield striking signatures at long baseline experiments. We study several representative observables to demonstrate this effect and find that current and future experiments including DUNE and JUNO are sensitive to a wide range of viable scalar parameters over many decades in mass reach.
Cosmological mechanisms that yield ultralight dark matter are insensitive to the intrinsic parity of a bosonic dark matter candidate, but that same quantity plays a crucial role in a direct detection experiment. The modification of electrodynamics in the presence of ultralight axion-like dark matter is well-known and has been used to realize sensitive probes of such sub-eV mass-scale dark matter, and analogous studies exist for hidden-photon dark matter as well. Here we reframe the modification of electrodynamics for ultralight dark matter of positive intrinsic parity, with a focus on the scal…
Numerous theories extending beyond the standard model of particle physics predict the existence of bosons that could constitute the dark matter (DM) permeating the universe. In the standard halo model (SHM) of galactic dark matter the velocity distribution of the bosonic DM field defines a characteristic coherence time $τ_c$. Until recently, laboratory experiments searching for bosonic DM fields have been in the regime where the measurement time $T$ significantly exceeds $τ_c$, so null results have been interpreted as constraints on the coupling of bosonic DM to standard model particles with a…
It has been suggested that the internal dynamics of dwarf spheroidal galaxies (dSphs) can be used to test whether or not ultralight axions with $m_a\sim 10^{-22}\text{eV}$ are a preferred dark matter candidate. However, comparisons to theoretical predictions tend to be inconclusive for the simple reason that while most cosmological models consider only dark matter, one observes only baryons. Here we use realistic kinematic mock data catalogs of Milky Way dSph's to show that the "mass-anisotropy degeneracy" in the Jeans equations leads to biased bounds on the axion mass in galaxies with unknown…
Among various dark matter candidates, bosonic ultralight fields with masses below 1~eV are well motivated. Recently, a number of novel approaches have been put forward to search for ultralight dark matter candidates using laser interferometers at various scales. Those include our proposals to search for axion-like particles (ALPs) and vector fields with laser interferometric gravitational wave detectors. ALPs can be searched for by measuring the oscillating polarization rotation of laser light. Massive vector fields weakly coupled to the standard model sector can also be searched for by measur…
Infrared dressing of bosonic or fermionic heavy particles by a cloud of massless particles to which they couple is studied as a possible production mechanism of ultra light dark matter or dark radiation in a radiation dominated cosmology. We implement an adiabatic expansion valid for wavelengths much smaller than the Hubble radius combined with a non-perturbative and manifestly unitary dynamical resummation method to study the time evolution of an initial single heavy particle state. We find a striking resemblance to the process of particle decay: the initial amplitude of the single particle d…
Ultralight bosons are promising dark matter candidates and can trigger superradiant instabilities of spinning black holes (BHs), resulting in long-lived rotating "bosonic clouds" around the BHs and dissipating their energy through the emission of monochromatic gravitational waves (GWs). We focus on the scalar bosons minimally coupled with both isolated stellar-origin BHs (SBH) and their binary merger remnants, and perform Bayesian data analysis to search for the stochastic GW background from all the unstable modes that can trigger the superradiant instabilities using the data of Advanced LIGO …
Structure formation simulations of ultralight bosonic dark matter, ruled by the Gross-Pitaevskii-Poisson (GPP) system of equations, show that dark matter clumps to form structures with density profiles consisting of a core surrounded by a power-law distribution. The core has a density profile similar to that of spherically symmetric equilibrium configurations of the GPP system. These configurations have been shown to be stable under a variety of perturbations and to have attractor properties. It is interesting to know the dominant frequencies of oscillation of these configurations. One reason …
Simulations of ultralight, $\sim 10^{-22}\,\rm eV$, bosonic dark matter exhibit rich wave-like structure, including a soliton core within a surrounding halo that continuously self-interferes on the de Broglie scale. We show here that as an inherent consequence, the soliton undergoes a confined random walk at the base of the halo potential. This is significant for the fate of the ancient central star cluster in Eridanus II, as the agitated soliton gravitationally shakes the star cluster in and out of the soliton on a time scale of $\sim 100\,\rm Myr$, so complete tidal disruption of the star cl…
Distinguishing Monochromatic Signals in LISA and Taiji: Ultralight Dark Matter versus Gravitational Waves
School of Fundamental Physics and Mathematical Sciences, Hangzhou Institute for Advanced Study, UCAS（杭州高等研究院基础物理与数学学院）；Institute of Theoretical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院理论物理研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS)（中国科学院大学）；International Center for Theoretical Physics Asia-Pacific（亚太理论物理中心）
We consider the implications of an ultra-light fermionic dark matter candidate that carries baryon number. This naturally arises if dark matter has a small charge under standard model baryon number whilst having an asymmetry equal and opposite to that in the visible universe. A prototypical model is a theory of dark baryons of a non-Abelian gauge group, i.e., a dark Quantum Chromo-Dynamics (QCD). For sub-eV dark baryon masses, the inner region of dark matter halos is naturally at 'nuclear density', allowing for the formation of exotic states of matter, akin to neutron stars. The Tremaine-Gunn …
Axion-like fields are naturally generated by a mechanism of anomaly cancellation of one or more anomalous gauge abelian symmetries at the Planck scale, emerging as duals of a two-form from the massless bosonic sector of string theory. This suggests an analogy of the Green-Schwarz mechanism of anomaly cancellation, at field theory level, which results in one or more Stueckelberg pseudoscalars. In the case of a single Stueckelberg pseudoscalar $b$, vacuum misalignments at phase transitions in the early Universe at the GUT scale provide a small mass - due to instanton suppression of the periodic …
We study the formation and the subsequent mass growth of axion stars inside axion miniclusters. Numerically solving the Schrödinger-Poisson equations with realistic initial conditions we find that the axion stars exhibit similar properties to solitonic cores in ultralight bosonic dark matter halos in terms of their radial density profiles and large-amplitude oscillations. A merger of two axion stars confirms a previously found empirical law for the mass of the merged axion star. Monitoring the axion star masses over time, we observe a mass growth consistent with the mass increase of Bose stars…
The last decade has seen unprecedented effort in dark matter model building at all mass scales coupled with the design of numerous new detection strategies. Transformative advances in quantum technologies have led to a plethora of new high-precision quantum sensors and dark matter detection strategies for ultralight ($<10\,$eV) bosonic dark matter that can be described by an oscillating classical, largely coherent field. This white paper focuses on searches for wavelike scalar and vector dark matter candidates.
Fuzzy dark matter (FDM) has been a promising alternative to standard cold dark matter. The model consists of ultralight bosons with mass $m_b \sim 10^{-22}$ eV and features a quantum-pressure-supported solitonic core that oscillates. In this work, we show that the soliton density oscillations persist even after significant tidal stripping of the outer halo. We report two intrinsic yet distinct timescales associated, respectively, with the ground-state soliton wavefunction $τ_{00}$ and the soliton density oscillations $τ_\text{soliton}$, obeying $τ_\text{soliton} /τ_{00} \simeq 2.3$. The centra…
We introduce a tool that solves the Schrödinger-Euler-Poisson system of equations and allows the study of the interaction between ultralight bosonic dark matter, whose dynamics is described with the Schrödinger-Poisson system and luminous matter which, as a first approximation, is modeled with a single component compressible ideal fluid. The two matter fields are coupled through the Poisson equation, whose source is the addition of both, dark matter and fluid densities. We describe the numerical methods used to solve the system of equations and present tests for each of the two components, tha…
Testing bosonic dark matter through white dwarf mass measurements
Universitat de València（瓦伦西亚大学）；Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México（墨西哥国立自治大学）；Universidad de Santiago de Compostela（圣地亚哥-德孔波斯特拉大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
Formation and relaxation of halos in the context of wave DM particles evolving on a background of neutrino condensate
Dipartimento di Fisica “E.R. Caianiello” Universitá di Salerno, and INFN – Gruppo Collegato di Salerno（萨莱诺大学物理系与意大利国家核物理研究院萨莱诺协作组）；Universidad de Salamanca（萨拉曼卡大学）；Insituto Universitario de Física Fundamental y Matemáticas (IUFFyM), Universidad de Salamanca（萨拉曼卡大学基础物理与数学大学研究所）；CENTRA, Departamento de Física, Instituto Superior Técnico – IST Universidade de Lisboa – UL（里斯本大学技术研究所物理中心）；University of Camerino（卡梅里诺大学）
We study the effects of a dark matter component that consists of bosonic particles with ultralight masses in the condensed state. We compare previous studies for both non-interacting condensates and with repulsive two-body terms and show consistency between the proposals. Furthermore, we explore the effects of rotation on a superfluid dark matter condensate, assuming that a vortex lattice forms as seen in ultracold atomic gas experiments. The influence of such a lattice in virialization of gravitationally bound structures and on galactic rotation velocity curves is explored. With fine-tuning o…
We review the physics and phenomenology of wave dark matter: a bosonic dark matter candidate lighter than about 30 eV. Such particles have a de Broglie wavelength exceeding the average inter-particle separation in a galaxy like the Milky Way, and are well described as classical waves. We outline the particle physics motivations for them, including the QCD axion and ultra-light axion-like-particles such as fuzzy dark matter. The wave nature of the dark matter implies a rich phenomenology: (1) Wave interference leads to order unity density fluctuations on de Broglie scale. A manifestation is vor…
The fuzzy dark matter (FDM) model treats DM as a bosonic field with astrophysically large de Broglie wavelength. A striking feature of this model is $\mathcal{O}(1)$ fluctuations in the dark matter density on time scales which are shorter than the gravitational timescale. Including for the first time the effect of core oscillations, we demonstrate how such fluctuations lead to heating of star clusters, and thus an increase in their size over time. From the survival of the old star cluster in Eridanus II we infer $m_a\gtrsim 0.6\rightarrow 1\times 10^{-19}\text{ eV}$ within modelling uncertaint…
In the presence of massive bosonic degrees of freedom, rotational superradiance can trigger an instability that spins down black holes. This leads to peculiar gravitational-wave signatures and distribution in the spin-mass plane, which in turn can impose stringent constraints on ultralight fields. Here, we demonstrate that there is an analogous spindown effect for conducting stars. We show that rotating stars amplify low frequency electromagnetic waves, and that this effect is largest when the time scale for conduction within the star is of the order of a light crossing time. This has interest…
Virialized Ultra-Light Fields (VULFs) are viable cold dark matter candidates and include scalar and pseudo-scalar bosonic fields, such as axions and dilatons. Direct searches for VULFs rely on low-energy precision measurement tools. While the previous proposals have focused on detecting coherent oscillations of the VULF signals at the VULF Compton frequencies at individual devices, here I consider a network of such devices. VULFs are essentially dark matter {\em waves} and as such they carry both temporal and spatial phase information. Thereby, the discovery reach can be improved by using netw…
Dark Matter Detection through Rydberg Atom Transducer
Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；International Shenzhen Quantum Academy（深圳国际量子研究院）；Peking University（北京大学）；Beijing Laser Acceleration Innovation Center（北京激光加速创新中心）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；City University of Hong Kong Shenzhen Research Institute（香港城市大学深圳研究院）；Nanjing University（南京大学）
Ultralight bosonic dark matter called fuzzy dark matter (FDM) has attracted much attention as an alternative to the cold dark matter. An intriguing feature of the FDM model is the presence of a soliton core, a stable dense core formed at the center of halos. In this paper, we analytically study the dependence of the soliton core properties on the halo characteristics by solving approximately the Schrödinger-Poisson equation. Focusing on the ground-state eigenfunction, we derive a key expression for the soliton core radius, from which we obtain the core-halo mass relations similar to those foun…
We present a theoretical analysis of some unexplored aspects of relaxed Bose-Einstein condensate dark matter (BECDM) haloes. This type of ultralight bosonic scalar field dark matter is a viable alternative to the standard cold dark matter (CDM) paradigm, as it makes the same large-scale predictions as CDM and potentially overcomes CDM's small-scale problems via a galaxy-scale de Broglie wavelength. We simulate BECDM halo formation through mergers, evolved under the Schrödinger-Poisson equations. The formed haloes consist of a soliton core supported against gravitational collapse by the quantum…
