Ultra-light dark matter in disk galaxies

Abstract

Analytic arguments and numerical simulations show that bosonic ultra-light dark matter (ULDM) would form cored density distributions (`solitons') at the center of galaxies. ULDM solitons offer a promising way to exclude or detect ULDM by looking for a distinctive feature in the central region of galactic rotation curves. Baryonic contributions to the gravitational potential pose an obstacle to such analyses, being (i) dynamically important in the inner galaxy and (ii) highly non-spherical in rotation-supported galaxies, resulting in non-spherical solitons. We present an algorithm for finding the ground state soliton solution in the presence of stationary non-spherical background baryonic mass distribution. We quantify the impact of baryons on the predicted ULDM soliton in the Milky Way and in low surface-brightness galaxies from the SPARC database.

19 pages, 23 figures. v2: added appendix B, explaining the imaginary-time successive over-relaxation method used in the numerical solution; match PRD version

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Cited by in corpus (3)

• The response of ultralight dark matter to supermassive black holes and binaries
• Dark matters on the scale of galaxies
• Testing the Prediction of Fuzzy Dark Matter Theory in the Milky Way Center