Slowly rotating Bose Einstein Condensate galactic dark matter halos, and their rotation curves

TL;DR

This paper models galactic dark matter halos as slowly rotating Bose-Einstein Condensates using the Gross-Pitaevskii equation, deriving their properties and fitting rotation curves to dwarf galaxy and Milky Way data.

Contribution

It introduces a theoretical framework for rotating BEC dark matter halos and derives explicit expressions for their astrophysical properties, comparing with observational data.

Findings

Derived density and velocity profiles for rotating BEC halos

Explicit formulas for halo radius, mass, and tangential velocity

Good fit of theoretical rotation curves to dwarf galaxy and Milky Way data

Abstract

If dark matter is composed of massive bosons, a Bose-Einstein Condensation process must have occurred during the cosmological evolution. Therefore galactic dark matter may be in a form of a condensate, characterized by a strong self-interaction. We consider the effects of rotation on the Bose-Einstein Condensate dark matter halos, and we investigate how rotation might influence their astrophysical properties. In order to describe the condensate we use the Gross-Pitaevskii equation, and the Thomas-Fermi approximation, which predicts a polytropic equation of state with polytropic index $n=1$. By assuming a rigid body rotation for the halo, with the use of the hydrodynamic representation of the Gross-Pitaevskii equation we obtain the basic equation describing the density distribution of the rotating condensate. We obtain the general solutions for the condensed dark matter density, and we derive the general representations for the mass distribution, boundary (radius), potential energy, velocity dispersion, tangential velocity and for the logarithmic density and velocity slopes, respectively. Explicit expressions for the radius, mass, and tangential velocity are obtained in the first order of approximation, under the assumption of slow rotation. In order to compare our results with the observations we fit the theoretical expressions of the tangential velocity of massive test particles moving in rotating Bose-Einstein Condensate dark halos with the data of 12 dwarf galaxies, and the Milky Way, respectively.