No Arabic abstract
We discuss the thermal evolution and Bose-Einstein condensation of ultra-light dark matter particles at finite, realistic cosmological temperatures. We find that if these particles decouple from regular matter before Standard model particles annihilate, their temperature will be about 0.9 K. This temperature is substantially lower than the temperature of CMB neutrinos and thus Big Bang Nucleosynthesis remains unaffected. In addition the temperature is consistent with WMAP 7-year+BAO+H0 observations without fine-tuning. We focus on particles of mass of $msim 10^{-23}$ eV, which have Compton wavelengths of galactic scales. Agglomerations of these particles can form stable halos and naturally prohibit small scale structure. They avoid over-abundance of dwarf galaxies and may be favored by observations of dark matter distributions. We present numerical as well as approximate analytical solutions of the Friedmann-Klein-Gordon equations and study the cosmological evolution of this scalar field dark matter from the early universe to the era of matter domination. Today, the particles in the ground state mimic presureless matter, while the excited state particles are radiation like.
We study the dynamics of cosmological perturbations in models of dark matter based on ultralight coherent vector fields. Very much as for scalar field dark matter, we find two different regimes in the evolution: for modes with $k^2ll {cal H}ma$, we have a particle-like behaviour indistinguishable from cold dark matter, whereas for modes with $k^2gg {cal H}ma$, we get a wave-like behaviour in which the sound speed is non-vanishing and of order $c_s^2simeq k^2/m^2a^2$. This implies that, also in these models, structure formation could be suppressed on small scales. However, unlike the scalar case, the fact that the background evolution contains a non-vanishing homogeneous vector field implies that, in general, the evolution of the three kinds of perturbations (scalar, vector and tensor) can no longer be decoupled at the linear level. More specifically, in the particle regime, the three types of perturbations are actually decoupled, whereas in the wave regime, the three vector field perturbations generate one scalar-tensor and two vector-tensor perturbations in the metric. Also in the wave regime, we find that a non-vanishing anisotropic stress is present in the perturbed energy-momentum tensor giving rise to a gravitational slip of order $(Phi-Psi)/Phisim c_s^2$. Moreover in this regime the amplitude of the tensor to scalar ratio of the scalar-tensor modes is also $h/Phisim c_s^2$. This implies that small-scale density perturbations are necessarily associated to the presence of gravity waves in this model. We compare their spectrum with the sensitivity of present and future gravity waves detectors.
An intriguing alternative to cold dark matter (CDM) is that the dark matter is a light ( $m sim 10^{-22}$ eV) boson having a de Broglie wavelength $lambda sim 1$ kpc, often called fuzzy dark matter (FDM). We describe the arguments from particle physics that motivate FDM, review previous work on its astrophysical signatures, and analyze several unexplored aspects of its behavior. In particular, (i) FDM halos smaller than about $10^7 (m/10^{-22} {rm eV})^{-3/2} M_odot$ do not form. (ii) FDM halos are comprised of a core that is a stationary, minimum-energy configuration called a soliton, surrounded by an envelope that resembles a CDM halo. (iii) The transition between soliton and envelope is determined by a relaxation process analogous to two-body relaxation in gravitating systems, which proceeds as if the halo were composed of particles with mass $sim rholambda^3$ where $rho$ is the halo density. (iv) Relaxation may have substantial effects on the stellar disk and bulge in the inner parts of disk galaxies. (v) Relaxation can produce FDM disks but an FDM disk in the solar neighborhood must have a half-thickness of at least $300 (m/10^{-22} {rm eV})^{-2/3}$ pc. (vi) Solitonic FDM sub-halos evaporate by tunneling through the tidal radius and this limits the minimum sub-halo mass inside 30 kpc of the Milky Way to roughly $10^8 (m/10^{-22} {rm eV})^{-3/2} M_odot$. (vii) If the dark matter in the Fornax dwarf galaxy is composed of CDM, most of the globular clusters observed in that galaxy should have long ago spiraled to its center, and this problem is resolved if the dark matter is FDM.
Light scalars (as the axion) with mass m ~ 10^{-22} eV forming a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) exhibit a Jeans length in the kpc scale and were therefore proposed as dark matter (DM) candidates. Our treatment here is generic, independent of the particle physics model and applies to all DM BEC, in or out of equilibrium. Two observed quantities crucially constrain DM in an inescapable way: the average DM density rho_{DM} and the phase-space density Q. The observed values of rho_{DM} and Q in galaxies today constrain both the possibility to form a BEC and the DM mass m. These two constraints robustly exclude axion DM that decouples just after the QCD phase transition. Moreover, the value m ~ 10^{-22} eV can only be obtained with a number of ultrarelativistic degrees of freedom at decoupling in the trillions which is impossible for decoupling in the radiation dominated era. In addition, we find for the axion vacuum misalignment scenario that axions are produced strongly out of thermal equilibrium and that the axion mass in such scenario turns to be 17 orders of magnitude too large to reproduce the observed galactic structures. Moreover, we also consider inhomogenous gravitationally bounded BECs supported by the bosonic quantum pressure independently of any particular particle physics scenario. For a typical size R ~ kpc and compact object masses M ~ 10^7 Msun they remarkably lead to the same particle mass m ~ 10^{-22} eV as the BEC free-streaming length. However, the phase-space density for the gravitationally bounded BECs turns to be more than sixty orders of magnitude smaller than the galaxy observed values. We conclude that the BECs and the axion cannot be the DM particle. However, an axion in the mili-eV scale may be a relevant source of dark energy through the zero point cosmological quantum fluctuations.
We study the environmental dependence of ultralight scalar dark matter (DM) with linear interactions to the standard model particles. The solution to the DM field turns out to be a sum of the cosmic harmonic oscillation term and the local exponential fluctuation term. The amplitude of the first term depends on the local DM density and the mass of the DM field. The second term is induced by the local distribution of matter, such as the Earth. Then, we compute the phase shift induced by the DM field in atom interferometers (AIs), through solving the trajectories of atoms. Especially, the AI signal for the violation of weak equivalence principle (WEP) caused by the DM field is calculated. Depending on the values of the DM coupling parameters, contributions to the WEP violation from the first and second terms of the DM field can be either comparable or one larger than the other. Finally, we give some constraints to DM coupling parameters using results from the terrestrial atomic WEP tests.
The free parameters of a flat accelerating model without dark energy are constrained by using Supernovae type Ia and observational H(z) data. Instead of the vacuum dominance, the present accelerating stage in this modified Einstein-de Sitter cosmology is a consequence of the gravitationally-induced particle production of cold dark matter. The model present a transition from a decelerating to an accelerating regime at low redshifts, and is also able to harmonize a cold dark matter picture with the latest measurements of the Hubble constant H_0, the Supernovae observations (Constitution sample), and the H(z) data.