Nordita Astrophysics Seminars

Testing classicality in scalar field dark matter

by Andrew Eberhardt (Stanford University)

Europe/Stockholm
https://stockholmuniversity.zoom.us/j/530682073

https://stockholmuniversity.zoom.us/j/530682073

Description

The nature of dark matter, one of the major components of the cosmic standard model, remains one of the outstanding problems in physics. One interesting model is scalar field dark matter (SFDM), which fits naturally into observations in both particle physics and cosmology. Simulations and calculations using SFDM often use a classical field approximation (MFT) of the underlying quantum field theory. And while it is suspected that large occupation numbers make this description good in the early universe, it is possible that this approximation fails during nonlinear structure growth and begins to admit important quantum corrections. In order to investigate this possibility, we develop a method which simulates an extension of the MFT which tracks the leading order quantum corrections. The method is tested using a number of quantum problems which can be simulated numerically. We then investigate how the quantum corrections evolve in nonlinear growth scenarios and use this to estimate the duration of a MFT of SFDM.