2018/04/30 by Jan Veltmaat, Jens C. Niemeyer, Bodo Schwabe · 3 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #astro-ph.CO #astro-ph.GA #gr-qc
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.98.043509
published as Phys. Rev. D 98, 043509 (2018) · 8 pages, 8 figures, accepted by PRD
arxiv created 2018/08/08 · arxiv updated 2018/08/15
We simulate the formation and evolution of ultralight bosonic dark matter halos from cosmological initial conditions. Using zoom-in techniques we are able to resolve the detailed interior structure of the halos. We observe the formation of solitonic cores and confirm the core-halo mass relation previously found by Schive et al. The cores exhibit strong quasi-normal oscillations that remain largely undamped on evolutionary timescales. On the other hand, no conclusive growth of the core mass by condensation or relaxation can be detected. In the incoherent halo surrounding the cores, the scalar field density profiles and velocity distributions show no significant deviation from collisionless N-body simulations on scales larger than the coherence length. Our results are consistent with the core properties being determined mainly by the coherence length at the time of virialization, whereas the Schrödinger-Vlasov correspondence explains the halo properties when averaged on scales greater than the coherence length.