No Arabic abstract
We study how tidal streams from globular clusters may be used to constrain the mass of ultra-light dark matter particles, called `fuzzy dark matter (FDM). A general feature of FDM models is the presence of ubiquitous density fluctuations in bound, virialized dark matter structures, on the scale of the de Broglie wavelength, arising from wave interference in the evolving dark matter distribution. These time-varying fluctuations can disturb the motions of stars, leading to potentially observable signatures in cold thin tidal streams in our own Galaxy. The study of this effect has been hindered by the difficulty in simulating the FDM wavefunction in Milky Way-sized systems. We present a simple method to evolve realistic wavefunctions in nearly static potentials, that should provide an accurate estimate of this granulation effect. We quantify the impact of FDM perturbations on tidal streams, and show that initially, while stream perturbations are small in amplitude, their power spectra exhibit a sharp cutoff corresponding to the de Broglie wavelength of the FDM potential fluctuations. Eventually, when stream perturbations become nonlinear, fold caustics generically arise that lead to density fluctuations with universal behavior. This erases the signature of the de Broglie wavelength in the stream density power spectrum, but we show that it will still be possible to determine the FDM mass in this regime, by considering the fluctuations in quantities like angular momenta or actions.
We simulate the growth of isolated dark matter haloes from self-similar and spherically symmetric initial conditions. Our N-body code integrates the geodesic deviation equation in order to track the streams and caustics associated with individual simulation particles. The radial orbit instability causes our haloes to develop major-to-minor axis ratios approaching 10 to 1 in their inner regions. They grow similarly in time and have similar density profiles to the spherical similarity solution, but their detailed structure is very different. The higher dimensionality of the orbits causes their stream and caustic densities to drop much more rapidly than in the similarity solution. This results in a corresponding increase in the number of streams at each point. At 1% of the turnaround radius (corresponding roughly to the Suns position in the Milky Way) we find of order 10^6 streams in our simulations, as compared to 10^2 in the similarity solution. The number of caustics in the inner halo increases by a factor of several, because a typical orbit has six turning points rather than one, but caustic densities drop by a much larger factor. This reduces the caustic contribution to the annihilation radiation. For the region between 1% and 50% of the turnaround radius, this is 4% of the total in our simulated haloes, as compared to 6.5% in the similarity solution. Caustics contribute much less at smaller radii. These numbers assume a 100 GeV c^-2 neutralino with present-day velocity dispersion 0.03 cm s^-1, but reducing the dispersion by ten orders of magnitude only doubles the caustic luminosity. We conclude that caustics will be unobservable in the inner parts of haloes. Only the outermost caustic might potentially be detectable.
We model the 21cm power spectrum across the Cosmic Dawn and the Epoch of Reionization (EoR) in fuzzy dark matter (FDM) cosmologies. The suppression of small mass halos in FDM models leads to a delay in the onset redshift of these epochs relative to cold dark matter (CDM) scenarios. This strongly impacts the 21cm power spectrum and its redshift evolution. The 21cm power spectrum at a given stage of the EoR/Cosmic Dawn process is also modified: in general, the amplitude of 21cm fluctuations is boosted by the enhanced bias factor of galaxy hosting halos in FDM. We forecast the prospects for discriminating between CDM and FDM with upcoming power spectrum measurements from HERA, accounting for degeneracies between astrophysical parameters and dark matter properties. If FDM constitutes the entirety of the dark matter and the FDM particle mass is 10-21eV, HERA can determine the mass to within 20 percent at 2-sigma confidence.
Fuzzy Dark Matter (FDM), motivated by string theory, has recently become a hot candidate for dark matter. The rest mass of FDM is believed to be $sim 10^{-22}$eV and the corresponding de-Broglie wave length is $sim 1$kpc. Therefore, the quantum effect of FDM plays an important role in structure formation. In order to study the cosmological structure formation in FDM model, several simulation techniques have been introduced. We review the current status and challenges in the cosmological simulation for the FDM model in this paper.
We present the first and so far the only simulations to follow the fine-grained phase-space structure of galaxy haloes formed from generic LCDM initial conditions. We integrate the geodesic deviation equation in tandem with the N-body equations of motion, demonstrating that this can produce numerically converged results for the properties of fine-grained phase-space streams and their associated caustics, even in the inner regions of haloes. Our effective resolution for such structures is many orders of magnitude better than achieved by conventional techniques on even the largest simulations. We apply these methods to the six Milky Way-mass haloes of the Aquarius Project. At 8 kpc from halo centre a typical point intersects about 10^14 streams with a very broad range of individual densities; the ~10^6 most massive streams contribute about half of the local dark matter density. As a result, the velocity distribution of dark matter particles should be very smooth with the most massive fine-grained stream contributing about 0.1% of the total signal. Dark matter particles at this radius have typically passed 200 caustics since the Big Bang. The peak densities on present-day caustics in the inner halo almost all lie well below the mean local dark matter density. As a result caustics provide a negligible boost (<0.1%) to the predicted local dark matter annihilation rate. The effective boost is larger in the outer halo but never exceeds about 10%. Thus fine-grained streams and their associated caustics have no effect on the detectability of dark matter, either directly in Earth-bound laboratories, or indirectly through annihilation radiation, with the exception that resonant cavity experiments searching for axions may see the most massive local fine-grained streams because of their extreme localisation in energy/momentum space. (abridged)
Fuzzy dark matter (FDM) has been a promising alternative to standard cold dark matter. The model consists of ultralight bosons with mass $m_b sim 10^{-22}$ eV and features a quantum-pressure-supported solitonic core that oscillates. In this work, we show that the soliton density oscillations persist even after significant tidal stripping of the outer halo. We report two intrinsic yet distinct timescales associated, respectively, with the ground-state soliton wavefunction $tau_{00}$ and the soliton density oscillations $tau_text{soliton}$, obeying $tau_text{soliton} /tau_{00} simeq 2.3$. The central star cluster (SC) in Eridanus II has a characteristic timescale $tau_text{soliton} / tau_text{SC} sim 2$ to $3$ that deviates substantially from unity. As a result, we demonstrate, both analytically and numerically with three-dimensional self-consistent FDM simulations, that the gravitational heating of the SC owing to soliton density oscillations is negligible irrespective of $m_b$. We also show that the subhalo mass function to form Eridanus II does not place a strong constraint on $m_b$. These results are contrary to the previous findings by Marsh & Niemeyer (2019).