Simulations of solitonic core mergers in ultralight axion dark matter cosmologies

By B. Schwabe, Jens C. Niemeyer, J. F. Engels. 2016

191 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Using three-dimensional simulations, we study the dynamics and final structure of merging solitonic cores predicted to form in ultralight axion dark matter halos. The classical, Newtonian equations of motion of a self-gravitating scalar field are described by the Schr\"odinger-Poisson equations. We investigate mergers of ground state (boson star) configurations with varying mass ratios, relative phases, orbital angular momenta and initial separation with the primary goal to understand the mass loss of the emerging core by gravitational cooling. Previous results showing that the final density profiles have solitonic cores and Navarro-Frenk-White-like tails are confirmed. In binary mergers, the final core mass does not depend on initial phase difference or angular momentum and only depends on mass ratio, total initial mass, and total energy of the system. For nonzero angular momenta, the otherwise spherical cores become rotating ellipsoids. The results for mergers of multiple cores are qualitatively identical.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b87453405ee35372e5d4025e005c122063529400

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Citations in the corpus

Ultralight scalars as cosmological dark matter (2016, background): “This expectation is demonstrated by simulations [16, 45, 53, 54].”
Dynamical boson stars (2012, background): “Three dimensional simulations of solitonic core mergers colliding two or more boson stars in the Newtonian limit (Schrödinger-Poisson) are studied in the context of dark matter with different mass ratios, phases and orbital angular momentum [329].”