Cold and Fuzzy Dark Matter

Abstract

Cold dark matter (CDM) models predict small-scale structure in excess of observations of the cores and abundance of dwarf galaxies. These problems might be solved, and the virtues of CDM models retained, even without postulating {\it ad hoc} dark matter particle or field interactions, if the dark matter is composed of ultra-light scalar particles (m ~ 10^{-22}eV), initially in a (cold) Bose-Einstein condensate, similar to axion dark matter models. The wave properties of the dark matter stabilize gravitational collapse providing halo cores and sharply suppressing small-scale linear power.

Comments: 4 pages, 2 figures, submitted to PRL