Self-interactions of ULDM to the rescue?

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. $m\sim 10^{-22}\text{eV}$. 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 $100\%$ 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 $m=10^{-22}\text{eV}$, the requirement of satisfying both galactic rotation curves as well as SH relations can be fulfilled with repulsive self-coupling $\lambda \sim \mathcal{O}(10^{-90})$.

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

References in corpus (14)

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Cited by in corpus (11)

• Short Review of the main achievements of the Scalar Field, Fuzzy, Ultralight, Wave, BEC Dark Matter model
• Confronting fuzzy dark matter with the rotation curves of nearby dwarf irregular galaxies
• Gravitational wave probes on self-interacting dark matter surrounding an intermediate mass black hole
• Supersonic friction of a black hole traversing a self-interacting scalar dark matter cloud
• Dynamical friction in self-interacting ultralight dark matter
• Detecting dark matter oscillations with gravitational waveforms
• ULDM self-interactions, tidal effects and tunnelling out of satellite galaxies
• Accretion of Self-interacting Scalar Field Dark Matter Onto a Reissner-Nordström Black Hole
• Virialized Profiles and Oscillations of Self-interacting Fuzzy Dark Matter Solitons
• Formation of solitons and their transitions in scalar-field dark matter models with a non-polynomial self-interaction potential
• Dynamical reconstruction of SPARC galactic halos within self-interacting fuzzy dark matter