Hybrid model of condensate and particle Dark Matter: linear perturbations in the hydrodynamic limit

Abstract

We analyse perturbations of self-interacting, scalar field dark matter that contains modes both in a coherent condensate state and an incoherent particle-like state. Starting from the coupled equations for the condensate, the particles' phase space distribution and their mutual gravitational potential, first derived from first principles in earlier work by the authors, we derive a hydrodynamic limit of two coupled fluids and study their linearized density perturbations in an expanding universe, also including particle pressure under an assumption for an equation of state consistent with the dynamical equations. We find that away from the condensate-only or particle-only limits, and for certain ranges of the parameters, such self-interacting mixtures can significantly enhance the density power spectrum above the standard linear $\Lambda$CDM value at localised wavenumbers, even pushing structure formation into the non-linear regime earlier than expected in $\Lambda$CDM for these scales. We also note that such mixtures can lead to degeneracies between models with different boson masses and self-coupling strengths, in particular between self-coupled models and non-coupled Fuzzy Dark Matter made up of heavier bosons. These findings open up the possibility of a richer phenomenology in scalar field dark matter models and could further inform efforts to place observational limits on their parameters.