Vortices and Angular Momentum in Bose-Einstein-Condensed Cold Dark Matter Halos

Abstract

If cold dark matter elementary particles form a Bose-Einstein condensate, their superfluidity may distinguish them from other forms of cold dark matter, including creation of quantum vortices. We demonstrate here that such vortices are favoured in strongly-coupled condensates, while this is not the case for axions, which are generally presumed to form a Bose-Einstein condensate but are effectively non-interacting.

Comments: 5 pages, 1 figure; minor corrections; final version, to appear in 'New Horizons in Astronomy (Bash Symposium 2009)', Proceedings of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, eds. L. Stanford, L. Hao, Y. Mao, J. Green