When to interfere with dark matter? The impact of wave dynamics on statistics

Understand

Ultralight candidates for dark matter can present wavelike features on astrophysical scales.

• Full wave based simulations of such candidates are currently limited to box sizes of 1--10 Mpc/$h$ on a side, limiting our understanding of the impact of wave dynamics on the scale of the cosmic web.
• We present a statistical analysis of density fields produced by perturbative forward models in boxes of 128 Mpc/$h$ side length.
• Our wave-based perturbation theory maintains interference on all scales, and is compared to fluid dynamics of Lagrangian perturbation theory.