The Effective Field Theory of Large-scale Structures of a Fuzzy Dark Matter Universe

Abstract

Ultralight scalar fields and their noninteracting class, i.e., the so-called fuzzy dark matter (FDM), are dark matter candidates introduced to solve the small-scale problems of the standard cold dark matter. In this paper, we investigate whether the physics of FDM, particularly the quantum pressure that leads to the suppression of structure formation on small scales, could leave significant imprints on the large-scale statistics of matter fluctuations. For this purpose, we utilize the Effective Field Theory of Large Scale Structures (EFT of LSS), wherein small-scale physics is integrated and represented on large scales by only a set of free parameters. These parameters can be determined by fitting them into the cosmological simulations. By fitting the EFT predictions to the simulation data, we determine the value of the speed of sound as a quantitative measure of how UV physics affects large-scale perturbation. We use the Gadget-2 code to study the evolution of 512 ^3 particles in a box with a side length 250 h ^−1 Mpc. We exploit the suppressed FDM initial power for the FDM universe and perform N -body simulation sufficient to produce accurate—enough for our purpose—results on large scales. In particular, we perform three FDM simulations with different masses and compare their sound speed with the standard cold dark matter (CDM) simulation. We found no difference between the FDM and CDM sound speeds beyond the confidence intervals. However, a consistently increasing trend can be seen in the sound speed for lower masses. This result suggests further investigations using higher-resolution simulations.

Keywords

• Large-scale structure of the universe
• Dark matter distribution
• Cosmology
• Dark matter