Mustafa Amin (Rice University)

Waving in the Dark: Noisy, Warm, and Spinning Dark Fields

 

Abstract: When bosonic dark matter is sufficiently light, wave-dynamical effects can manifest on astrophysical and even cosmological scales. I will review a range of such phenomena across both linear and nonlinear regimes, including enhancements and suppressions in the density power spectrum, wave interference, soliton formation, and in some cases, generation of macroscopic spin angular momentum density. I will then discuss observational avenues to detect or constrain these effects, and how they can shed light on the fundamental properties of these dark fields (especially a lower bound on their mass) and their cosmological production mechanisms.