Heating of Milky Way disc stars by dark matter fluctuations in cold dark matter and fuzzy dark matter paradigms

Abstract

ABSTRACT Although highly successful on cosmological scales, cold dark matter (CDM) models predict unobserved overdense ‘cusps’ in dwarf galaxies and overestimate their formation rate. We consider an ultralight axion-like scalar boson which promises to reduce these observational discrepancies at galactic scales. The model, known as fuzzy dark matter (FDM), avoids cusps, suppresses small-scale power, and delays galaxy formation via macroscopic quantum pressure. We compare the substructure and density fluctuations of galactic dark matter haloes comprised of ultralight axions to conventional CDM results. Besides self-gravitating subhaloes, FDM includes non-virialized overdense wavelets formed by quantum interference patterns, which are an efficient source of heating to galactic discs. We find that, in the solar neighbourhood, wavelet heating is sufficient to give the oldest disc stars a velocity dispersion of ${\sim } {30}{\, \mathrm{km\, s}^{-1}}$ within a Hubble time if energy is not lost from the disc, the velocity dispersion increasing with stellar age as σD ∝ t0.4 in agreement with observations. Furthermore, we calculate the radius-dependent velocity dispersion and corresponding scaleheight caused by the heating of this dynamical substructure in both CDM and FDM with the determination that these effects will produce a flaring that terminates the Milky Way disc at $15\!-\!20{\, \mathrm{kpc}}$. Although the source of thickened discs is not known, the heating due to perturbations caused by dark substructure cannot exceed the total disc velocity dispersion. Therefore, this work provides a lower bound on the FDM particle mass of ma > 0.6 × 10−22 eV. Furthermore, FDM wavelets with this particle mass should be considered a viable mechanism for producing the observed disc thickening with time.