Scalar Field Dark Matter

In astrophysics Scalar Field Dark Matter is a classical, minimally coupled, real scalar field - postulated to account for the inferred dark matter.

The mass parameter of the scalar field is determined by the cut-off in the power spectrum at small scales, leading to a mass of about 10⁻²¹-10⁻²³ eV. [V. Sahni and L. Wang, "A New Cosmological Model of Quintessence and Dark Matter", Phys. Rev. D 62, 103517 (2000) [http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9910097 preprint] ; T. Matos and L. A. Ureña-López, "Quintessence and Scalar Dark Matter in the Universe", Class. Quant. Grav. 17, L75-L81 (2000) [http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0004332 preprint] ; "A Further Analysis of a Cosmological Model of Quintessence and Scalar Dark Matter", Phys. Rev. D 63, 063506 (2001) [http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0006024 preprint] .]

The dark matter can be described as a Bose-Einstein condensate of the ultralight quanta of the field [S.J. Sin, Phys. Rev., D50, 3650(1994), "Late-time phase transition and the galactic halo as a Bose liquid " [http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/9205208 preprint] ,] and boson stars [J. Lee and I. Koh Phys.Rev. D53,2236 (1996),"Galactic Halos As Boson Stars" [http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/9507385 preprint] ] . The enormous Compton wavelength of these particles prevents structure formation on small subgalactic scales, which is a major problem in traditional cold dark matter models.

The collapse of initial overdensities is studied in Refs. [ M. Alcubierre, F. S. Guzmán, T. Matos, D. Núñez, L. A. Ureña-López and P. Wiederhold, "Galactic Collapse of Scalar Field Dark Matter", Class. Quant. Grav. 19, 5017 (2002) [http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0110102 preprint] ; F. S. Guzmán and L. A. Ureña-López, "Evolution of the Schrödinger--Newton system for a self--gravitating scalar field", Phys. Rev. D 69, 124033 (2004) [http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0404014 preprint] ; "Gravitational cooling of self-gravitating Bose-Condensates", ApJ. 645, 814 (2006) [http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0603613 preprint] ; A. Bernal and F. S. Guzmán, "Scalar Field Dark Matter: non-spherical collapse and late time behavior", Phys. Rev. D 74, 063504 (2006) [http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0608523 preprint] .]

References

External links

* [http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa004&articleID=00084A33-908A-111B-87CB83414B7F0000 "Scaled-Up Darkness", Scientific American]