Halo formation and evolution in scalar field dark matter and cold dark matter: New insights from the fluid approach

Understand

(abridged) We present simulations of halo formation and evolution in scalar field dark matter (SFDM) cosmologies in the Thomas-Fermi regime, aka ``SFDM-TF", where a strong repulsive 2-particle self-interaction (SI) is included, being a valuable alternative to CDM, with the potential to resolve its ``cusp-core" problem.

• In general, SFDM behaves like a quantum fluid.
• Previous literature has presented two fluid approximations for SFDM-TF, as well as simulations of halo formation.
• These results confirmed earlier expectations and are generally in mutual agreement, but discrepancies were also reported.