Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: It is widely established that a lower bound on the dark matter particle mass, m, can be obtained by demanding that the de Broglie wavelength in a given galaxy must be smaller than the virial radius of the galaxy, leading to m 10 -22 eV when applied to typical dwarf galaxies.This lower limit has never been derived precisely or rigorously.We use stellar kinematical data for the Milky Way satellite galaxy Leo II to self-consistently reconstruct a statistical ensemble of dark matter wavefunctions and corresponding density profiles.By comparison to a data-driven, modelindependent reconstruction, and using a variant of the maximum mean discrepancy as a statistical measure, we determine that a self-consistent description of dark matter in the local Universe requires m > 2.2 × 10 -21 eV (CL > 95%).This lower limit is free of any assumptions pertaining to cosmology, microphysics (including spin), or dynamics of dark matter, and only assumes that it is predominantly composed of a single bosonic particle species.GitHub: The jaxsp library is available at timzimm/jaxsp.In addition, the scripts to generate the results in this work can be found at timzimm/boson dsph.
Authors: Marsh, David J. E., Fairbairn, Malcolm
Language: English
Subfield: Nuclear and High Energy Physics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W6990612324
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