WIDG Zoom Seminar: Luna Zagorac, Yale, “Parametrizing UltraLight Dark Matter Haloes Through Binary Soliton Core Mergers”

Event time: 
Thursday, May 7, 2020 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm
Location: 
other () See map
Event description: 

Of the outstanding questions in 21st century physics, one of the largest is certainly the make-up of the dominant form of mass in the universe, dark matter. UltraLight Dark Matter (ULDM) is a light axion-like dark matter candidate, whose dynamics are governed by the Schrodinger-Poisson system. The ground state solution of this system is a spherically symmetric soliton; however, its shape is incompatible with observation constraints on dark matter haloes. Instead, ULDM haloes which have a solitonic core and asymptote to an NFW-like profile at large distances can be created through mergers of ground state solitons. For this project, we create such haloes using our code to perform mergers of two initial solitons, which we will parametrize by initial soliton masses and their ratio, angular momentum, total energy, and relative phase. We will further model the oscillations of the resultant halo core, and investigate relaxation timescales for resultant haloes, both as functions of the above mentioned parameters.