galaxies Article Ultra Light Axionic Dark Matter: Galactic Halos and Implications for Observations with Pulsar Timing Arrays Ivan de Martino 1,* ID , Tom Broadhurst 1,2, S.-H. Henry Tye 3, Tzihong Chiueh 4, Hsi-Yu Schive 5 and Ruth Lazkoz 1 1 Department of Theoretical Physics, University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU, E-48080 Bilbao, Spain;
[email protected] (T.B.);
[email protected] (R.L.) 2 Ikerbasque, Basque Foundation for Science, E-48011 Bilbao, Spain 3 Institute for Advanced Study and Department of Physics, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China;
[email protected] 4 National Center for Theoretical Sciences, National Taiwan University, Taipei 10617, Taiwan;
[email protected] 5 National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Urbana, IL 61801, USA;
[email protected] * Correspondence:
[email protected] Received: 29 November 2017; Accepted: 8 January 2018; Published: 16 January 2018 Abstract: The cold dark matter (CDM) paradigm successfully explains the cosmic structure over an enormous span of redshifts. However, it fails when probing the innermost regions of dark matter halos and the properties of the Milky Way’s dwarf galaxy satellites. Moreover, the lack of experimental detection of Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) favors alternative candidates such as light axionic dark matter that naturally arise in string theory. Cosmological N-body simulations have shown that axionic dark matter forms a solitonic core of size of '150 pc in the innermost region of the galactic halos. The oscillating scalar field associated to the axionic dark matter halo produces an oscillating gravitational potential that induces a time dilation of the pulse arrival time of −22 '400 ns/(mB/10 eV) for pulsar within such a solitonic core.