Institute for Advanced Study/Princeton University Early Universe/Cosmology Lunch Discussion

The prospect of an ultra-light dark matter particle (also known as Fuzzy Dark Matter, or FDM) has recently drawn attention as a promising alternative to standard Cold Dark Matter (CDM). When the mass of the particle reaches below 10^-21 eV, quantum effects can suppress structure formation on galactic scales, potentially alleviating Standard CDM's small-scale tensions. However, a central challenge posed by FDM is the difficulty of simulating it in large volumes; simulations that numerically evolve the Schrödinger-Poisson system must resolve down to the de Broglie wavelength, making it practically impossible to simulate a Milky-Way-like galaxy with today's computational resources. I will present a wave generalization of the classic Schwarzschild method for constructing self-consistent halos -- such a halo consists of a suitable superposition of waves instead of particle orbits, chosen to yield a desired mean density profile. I will demonstrate that this construction method allows us to reliably simulate FDM halos at a fraction of the computational cost of typical FDM simulations. I will share a few preliminary results we have obtained using our construction method, and discuss several tests of FDM that we can now run more efficiently with this code.
 

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