Journal
PHYSICAL REVIEW D
Volume 104, Issue 6, Pages -Publisher
AMER PHYSICAL SOC
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.104.063038
Keywords
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Funding
- Vetenskapsradet (Swedish Research Council) [638-2013-8993]
- Oskar Klein Centre for Cosmoparticle Physics
- research environment grant Detecting Axion Dark Matter In The Lab (AxionDM) - Swedish Research Council (VR) [2019-02337]
- NWO through the VIDI research program Probing the Genesis of Dark Matter [680-47-5]
- program The Hidden Universe of Weakly Interacting Particles - Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (Dutch Research Council) [680.92.18.03]
- European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Grant [754496]
- Spanish Agencia Estatal de Investigacion (AEI, MICIU) [MDM-2017-0765]
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Axion miniclusters are dense bound structures of dark matter axions formed post-inflation, and interactions with baryonic objects can perturb or unbind them. Monte Carlo simulations characterize the spatial distribution and properties of miniclusters in the Milky Way, showing higher survival probabilities at the solar position compared to the Galactic Center.
Axion miniclusters are dense bound structures of dark matter axions that are predicted to form in the postinflationary 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. We consider two density profiles-Navarro-Frenk-White (NFW) and power-law (PL)-for the individual miniclusters in order to bracket the uncertainties on the minicluster population today due to their uncertain formation history. For our fiducial analysis at the solar position, we find a survival probability of 99% for miniclusters with PL profiles and 46% for those with NFW profiles. Our work extends previous estimates of this local survival probability to the entire MW. We find that towards the Galactic Center, the survival probabilities drop drastically. Although we present results for a particular initial halo mass function, our simulations can be easily recast to different models using the provided data and code (github.com/bradkav/axion-miniclusters) . Finally, we comment on the impact of our results on lensing, direct, and indirect detection.
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