A Quantum Description of Wave Dark MatterConfirmed

by Nicholas Rodd (Lawrence Berkeley National Lab)

Tuesday Apr 15, 2025, 1:00 p.m. → 2:30 p.m. America/Toronto

PI/3-394 - Skyroom (Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics)

In this talk I will outline a fundamentally quantum description of bosonic dark matter from which the conventional classical-wave picture emerges when the mass is far below 10 eV. Exploiting fundamental results from quantum optics I will argue that the density matrix for dark matter is explicitly mixed. The formalism provides a continuous description of DM through the wave-particle transition, and using this I show how density fluctuations over various physical scales evolve between the two limits, with a unique behavior for DM emerging near the boundary of the wave and particle descriptions. If time permits, I will briefly describe how these effects would appear in axion haloscopes.