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Lookup NU author(s): Milos Indjin, Dr Nick Keepfer, Dr Gary LiuORCiD, Professor Nikolaos ProukakisORCiD, Dr Gerasimos RigopoulosORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
© 2025 The Author(s). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal Astronomical Society.We examine the impact of moderate repulsive self-interactions on fuzzy dark matter haloes generated by merging smaller Gaussian density concentrations. We study the size of the core and the granules, the spatial dependence of the field's coherence, the turbulent vortex tangle, and the oscillation frequency of the central soliton, covering the range from quantum-pressure-dominated to self-interaction-dominated stabilization of the solitonic core. For the probed self-coupling strengths g and with a fixed initial configuration, mergers with increasing g result in cores with increased size and a reduced central density, oscillating with decreased frequency, in accordance with expectations from the study of isolated self-interacting fuzzy dark matter solitons. By contrast, the characteristic granule size and typical inter-vortex distances in the surrounding halo are only mildly affected, growing much less relative to the core. The total length of the vortex network, although less robust, shows no signs of decay over our simulation time-scales. The generated haloes therefore develop central self-interaction-dominated cores, but with the outer haloes still supported by quantum-pressure and classical kinetic energy in equipartition as in the non-interacting case. Furthermore, measures of coherence of the field clearly separate the condensed core, identified via the Penrose-Onsager (largest eigenvalue) mode of the entire classical field, from the surrounding quasi-coherent halo. Unlike the case, we observe a relative increase of incoherent fluctuations coexisting with the coherent mode at the centre of the halo with increasing g, a phenomenon also observed in laboratory condensates at non-zero temperature.
Author(s): Indjin M, Keepfer N, Liu I-K, Proukakis NP, Rigopoulos G
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Year: 2026
Volume: 545
Issue: 3
Print publication date: 01/01/2026
Online publication date: 19/11/2025
Acceptance date: 04/11/2025
Date deposited: 06/01/2026
ISSN (print): 0035-8711
ISSN (electronic): 1365-2966
Publisher: Oxford University Press
URL: https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/staf2046
DOI: 10.1093/mnras/staf2046
Data Access Statement: Data supporting this publication can be openly accessed under an ‘Open Data Commons Open Database License’ at https://doi.org/10.25405/data.ncl.30811160
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