Stellar Disruption of Axion Miniclusters in the Milky Way

Understand

Axion miniclusters are dense bound structures of dark matter axions that are predicted to form in the post-inflationary Peccei-Quinn symmetry breaking scenario.

• Although dense, miniclusters can easily be perturbed or even become unbound by interactions with baryonic objects such as stars.
• Here, we characterize the spatial distribution and properties of miniclusters in the Milky Way (MW) today after undergoing these stellar interactions throughout their lifetime.
• We do this by performing a suite of Monte Carlo simulations which track the miniclusters' structure and, in particular, accounts for partial disruption and mass loss through successive interactions.