The Zoom link for the Sydney-CPPC seminars is https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/2980559069. The seminars are open to everyone.

Seminar

Ultra-Light Dark Matter

by Dr Elisa Ferreira (Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics)

Australia/Sydney
Description

The nature of dark matter remains the biggest mysteries in cosmology. Although dark matter is one of the most studied and well known components of our universe, with its large-scale behaviour well understood, its origin is still unknown. For this reason, there are many different models to explain the nature of this elusive component. In this talk, I will present a class of dark matter models: ultra-light dark matter. In this class of models, dark matter is composed of ultra-light particles that condense in the interior of the halos of galaxies forming a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) or superfluid. BECs and superfluids are some of the most interesting quantum phenomena on macroscopic scales, and this wave nature of DM on galactic scales that arises upon condensation can address some of the curiosities of the behaviour of DM on small scales while maintaining the successes of LCDM on large scales. I will talk about this alternative class of dark matter models, showing the different constructions present in the literature and classifying them according to the way they achieve condensation. Those different categories exhibit different phenomenologies and have different and interesting astrophysical consequences that can be probed on small scales, as it also brings new predictions that can help elucidate the microphysics of dark matter.