Presentation #347.01 in the session Dark Matter & Dark Energy — iPoster Session.
In modern cosmological simulations, dark matter builds the backbone for galaxy formation through the process of halo collapse. While the current dark matter paradigm, i.e. cold dark matter, is able to capture the large-scale structure of the Universe, it predicts more small-scale structure (in the form of halos) than is actually observed. This issue may be resolved with the theory of fuzzy dark matter, which is made of ultra-light particles whose wavelike properties manifest on sub-galactic scales. The mechanism that suppresses halo collapse in this model is called quantum pressure, and arises from the Uncertainty principle. However, its behavior has yet to be fully understood in present theoretical models due to resolution limits. Using 3-D numerical simulations of individual halos, we performed a comprehensive analysis of how quantum pressure affects the collapse of fuzzy dark matter halos. Then, we made use of a semi-analytic treatment to predict the halo mass function for this theory. We find that fuzzy dark matter is able to delay the collapsing process and lead to less compact halo cores. In this way, we were able to explore how small-scale structure formation might occur in the Universe.