Scalar field dark matter with a cosh potential, revisited

Abstract

Dark matter models in which the constituent particle is an ultra-light boson have become part of the mainstream discussion in cosmology and astrophysics. At the classical level, the models are represented by the dynamics of a (real or complex) scalar field endowed with a potential that contains its self-interactions, and for this reason are generically known as scalar field dark matter models. Here, we revisit the properties of such a model with a cosh potential and compare it with other known examples in the literature. Within the cosmological context, the self-interaction in the potential induces a radiation-like behavior at early times of the scalar field density, which is followed by a proper matter-like behavior at the onset of rapid field oscillations around the minimum of the potential. The solutions are found by numerical means, and from them we obtain information about the cosmological observables up to the level of linear density perturbations. We also study the general properties of self-gravitating objects in the non-relativistic limit and determine the role in them of the self-interaction obtained from the cosh potential. An overall conclusion is that, for the range of values in its parameters allowed by different constraints, a cosh potential behaves almost indistinguishable from the simpler quadratic one, which also means that the two models suffer the same tight constraints from cosmological and astrophysical observations.