The three phases of self-gravitating scalar field ground states

Understand

It is generally assumed that scalar field dark matter halos would contain solitonic cores -- spherically symmetric ground state configurations -- at their centers.

• This is especially interesting in the case of ultralight dark matter (ULDM), where the solitons sizes are on the order of galaxies.
• In this work, we show that the paradigm of a spherically symmetric soliton embedded in the center of each halo is not universally valid in a scenario with multiple interacting scalar fields.
• In particular, sufficiently strong repulsive interspecies interactions make the fields immiscible.