Dynamics of a Dark Matter Field with a Quartic Self-Interaction Potential

Abstract

It may prove useful in cosmology to understand the behavior of the energy distribution in a scalar field that interacts only with gravity and with itself by a pure quartic potential, because if such a field existed it would be gravitationally produced, as a squeezed state, during inflation. It is known that the mean energy density in such a field after inflation varies with the expansion of the universe in the same way as radiation. I show that if the field initially is close to homogeneous, with small energy density contrast delta rho /rho and coherence length L, the energy density fluctuations behave like acoustic oscillations in an ideal relativistic fluid for a time on the order of L/|delta rho /rho|. This ends with the appearance of features that resemble shock waves, but interact in a close to elastic way that reversibly disturbs the energy distribution.

7 pages, 5 figures, submitted to Phys Rev D

References in corpus (2)

• Noninteracting dark matter
• A Model for Structure Formation Seeded by Gravitationally Produced Matter

Cited by in corpus (18)

• Repulsive Dark Matter
• Constraints on Galaxy Bias, Matter Density, and Primordial Non--Gausianity from the PSCz Galaxy Redshift Survey
• An Alternative to Particle Dark Matter
• ${\varphi }^2$ as Dark Matter
• Combining rotation curves and gravitational lensing: How to measure the equation of state of dark matter in the galactic halo
• Modelling galaxy halos using dark matter with pressure
• Axions: Bose Einstein Condensate or Classical Field?
• Features of galactic halo in a brane world model and observational constraints
• Quintessential perturbations during scaling regime
• Revisiting perfect fluid dark matter: Observational constraints from our galaxy
• Core Fragmentation in Simplest Superfluid Dark Matter Scenario
• Complex Scalar Field Reheating and Primordial Black Hole production
• Constraint on dark matter central density in the Eddington inspired Born-Infeld (EiBI) gravity with input from Weyl gravity
• Symplectic gauge fields and dark matter
• Palatini approach and large-scale magnetogenesis
• Mass decomposition of SLACS lens galaxies in Weyl conformal gravity
• On Dark Matter As A Geometric Effect in the Galactic Halo
• Non-Thermal Dark Matter, High Energy Cosmic Rays and Late-Decaying Particles From Inflationary Quantum Fluctuations