A Quantum Description of Wave Dark Matter

Speaker: Nick Rodd (LBNL)

Date: Monday, February 24, 2025

Time: 4:00 – 5:00 pm

Location: 472 Willamette Hall (IFS Seminar Room)

Abstract:

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 and describe how to precisely define and understand the coherent properties of the wave. The formalism further 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.

Host; Ben Lillard