Soliton Merger Rates and Enhanced Axion Dark Matter Decay

Abstract

Solitons are observed to form in simulations of dark matter (DM) halos consisting of bosonic fields. We use the extended Press-Schechter formalism to compute the mass function of solitons, assuming various forms for the relationship between halo mass and soliton mass. We further provide a new calculation of the rate of soliton major mergers. Solitons composed of axion DM are unstable above a critical mass, and decay to either relativistic axions or photons, depending on the values of the coupling constants. We use the computed soliton major merger rate to predict the enhanced DM decay rate due to soliton instability. For certain values of currently allowed axion parameters, the energy injection into the intergalactic medium from soliton decays to photons is comparable to or larger than the energy injection due to core collapse supernovae at $z>10$. A companion paper explores the phenomenology of such an energy injection.

arXiv comment18 pages, 18 figures. Version 2: matches published version. Add an appendix discussing the timescale of axion star merging process due to dynamical friction

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Cited by in corpus (11)

• Axion Star Explosions: A New Source for Axion Indirect Detection
• Photons from dark photon solitons via parametric resonance
• Axion minicluster streams in the solar neighbourhood
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• Interference in Fuzzy Dark Matter Filaments: Idealised Models and Statistics
• Detecting the $\pi$-axiverse through parametric resonance