Speaker
Description
The nature of dark matter, one of the major components of the cosmic
standard model, remains one of the outstanding problems in physics. One
interesting model is scalar field dark matter (SFDM), which fits naturally
into observations in both particle physics and cosmology. Simulations and
calculations using SFDM often use a classical field approximation (MFT) of
the underlying quantum field theory. And while it is suspected that large
occupation numbers make this description good in the early universe, it is
possible that this approximation fails during nonlinear structure growth
and begins to admit important quantum corrections. To investigate this
possibility, we compare simulations using the MFT to those that take into
account these corrections. By studying their behavior as we scale the total
number of particles in the system we can estimate how long the MFT remains
an accurate description of the system. We estimate that quantum corrections begin to become important around 300 Myr. In this talk we will explain how
these simulations are performed, as well as their results, and their
potential implications.
