Abstract

Fuzzy Dark Matter (FDM) has been attracting increasing attention over the last decade as a popular dark matter model, alternative to Cold Dark Matter. After briefly reviewing the cosmological motivations for introducing such a model to describe dark matter, I will describe our recent work on the relation of the halos formed in FDM to the Bose-Einstein condensates at non-zero temperature studied in cold atom systems and the effects of a non-zero self-coupling on the characteristic solitons formed at the halos’ centres as well as the surrounding halo. I will then present a new general theory of a mixture of condensed and non-condensed bosonic dark matter and its implications for structure formation. Finally, I will discuss the determination of the boson’s mass and self-coupling from the rotation curves of a sample of dark mater dominated galaxies from the Sparc database. The studied galaxies imply that a non-zero, repulsive, quartic self-interaction is required.