Searching for Quantum Structures in Axion Dark Matter

  • Sept. 23, 2019, 2:00 pm US/Central
  • Curia II
  • Erik Lentz, Georg-August Universitaet Goettingen

Axions and axion-like particles are becoming increasingly attractive candidates for the dark matter. Likewise, searches for these candidates are growing in sophistication, number, reach, and may span much of the candidates’ viable parameter space in the next decade. Many of these searches are capable of extracting detailed knowledge of the local axion distribution, and may tell us a great deal about the formation of our own galaxy. Our understanding of axion structure formation is far from complete, however, due largely to the candidate’s unique properties as a highly-degenerate Bose fluid. I present in this talk a new model of structure formation for the well-motivated QCD axion which respects these properties. Theory and preliminary simulations show notable structural deviations from standard cold dark matter models due to exchange-correlation interactions. Applications to observations and axion search efforts are discussed.