English

Self-interactions of ULDM to the rescue?

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2023-07-07 v2 High Energy Physics - Phenomenology

Abstract

One of the most important questions in cosmology is concerning the fundamental nature of dark matter (DM). DM could consist of spinless particles of very small mass i.e. m1022 eVm \sim 10^{-22}\ \text{eV}. This kind of ultralight dark matter (ULDM) would form cored density profiles (called "solitons") at the centre of galaxies. In this context, recently it has been argued that (a) there exists a power law relation between the mass of the soliton and mass of the surrounding halo called the Soliton-Halo (SH) relation, and, (b) the requirement of satisfying observed galactic rotation curves as well as SH relations is so stringent that ULDM is disfavoured from comprising 100%100\% of the total cosmological dark matter. In this work, we revisit these constraints for ULDM particles with non-negligible quartic self-interactions. Using a recently obtained soliton-halo relation which takes into account the effect of self-interactions, we present evidence which suggests that, for m=1022 eVm = 10^{-22}\ \text{eV}, the requirement of satisfying both galactic rotation curves as well as SH relations can be fulfilled with repulsive self-coupling λO(1090)\lambda \sim \mathcal{O}(10^{-90}).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2304.04463,
  title  = {Self-interactions of ULDM to the rescue?},
  author = {Bihag Dave and Gaurav Goswami},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2304.04463},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

29 pages, 11 figures. Version accepted for publication in JCAP. Have included a sub-section on the effect of changing scalar field mass and improved discussion in the appendices