Cosmological particle-in-cell simulations with ultralight axion dark matter

TL;DR

This paper introduces a particle-mesh simulation method for ultralight axion dark matter, accurately capturing quantum pressure effects in cosmological structure formation, and highlights its importance for precision dark matter studies.

Contribution

The authors develop a new particle-mesh simulation approach that incorporates quantum pressure in FDM, enabling more accurate cosmological modeling compared to traditional N-body methods.

Findings

The simulation conserves energy at subpercent levels and reproduces linear behavior.

Core-halo profiles match those from direct Schrödinger equation simulations.

Quantum pressure effects cause up to 10% differences in the power spectrum near the quantum Jeans length.

Abstract

We study cosmological structure formation with ultralight axion dark matter, or "fuzzy dark matter (FDM), using a particle-mesh scheme to account for the quantum pressure arising in the Madelung formulation of the Schr\"odinger-Poisson equations. Subpercent-level energy conservation and correct linear behavior are demonstrated. Whereas the code gives rise to the same core-halo profiles as direct simulations of the Schr\"odinger equation, it does not reproduce the detailed interference patterns. In cosmological simulations with FDM initial conditions, we find a maximum relative difference of O($10\%$) in the power spectrum near the quantum Jeans length compared to using a standard N-body code with identical initial conditions. This shows that the effect of quantum pressure during nonlinear structure formation cannot be neglected for precision constraints on a dark matter component consisting of ultralight axions.