Dark matter is, alongside dark energy, one of the most
intriguing problems in contemporary cosmology. It explains many
phenomena of large scale structure formation, but direct searches for
the fundamental particle have been to no avail. One of the forefront
candidates for dark matter is the axion field, which in its ultralight
limit behaves as cold dark matter on large cosmological scales but
exhibits wave-like dynamics on galactic scales. This has been shown to
solve some small-scale problems of cold dark matter, but there are tight
constraints on the axion mass. These constraints can be significantly
alleviated if one considers mixed fuzzy and cold dark matter scenarios.
In my talk I will show how we employ numerical simulations to model the
non-linear dynamics of the axion field which obeys the coupled
Schroedinger-Poisson equations. For this purpose we developed a code
called AxioNyx which features adaptive mesh refinement and is publicly
available.
Description