Kavli Affiliate: Risa H. Wechsler
| First 5 Authors: Noah Glennon, Ethan O. Nadler, Nathan Musoke, Arka Banerjee, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
| Summary:
Ultralight axions (ULAs) are promising dark matter candidates that can have a
distinct impact on the formation and evolution of structure on nonlinear scales
relative to the cold, collisionless dark matter (CDM) paradigm. However, most
studies of structure formation in ULA models do not include the effects of
self-interactions, which are expected to arise generically. Here, we study how
the tidal evolution of solitons is affected by ULA self-interaction strength
and sign. Specifically, using the pseudospectral solver UltraDark.jl, we
simulate the tidal disruption of self-interacting solitonic cores as they orbit
a $10^{11}~M_{mathrm{odot}}$ Navarro-Frenk-White CDM host halo potential for
a range of orbital parameters, assuming a fiducial ULA particle mass of
$10^{-22}mathrm{eV}$. We find that repulsive (attractive) self-interactions
significantly accelerate (decelerate) soliton tidal disruption. We also
identify a degeneracy between the self-interaction strength and soliton mass
that determines the efficiency of tidal disruption, such that disruption
timescales are affected at the $sim 50%$ level for variations in the
dimensionless ULA self-coupling from $lambda=-10^{-92}$ to $lambda=10^{-92}$.
| Search Query: ArXiv Query: search_query=au:”Risa H. Wechsler”&id_list=&start=0&max_results=10