Dark Matter Superfluidity and Galactic Dynamics

by Dr Lasha Berezhiani

Tuesday 27 Feb 2018, 16:15 → 18:15 Europe/Berlin

Main Auditorium (Max Planck Institute für Physik)

After a brief overview of the successes and challenges of the standard cosmological model (LCDM), I will discuss a novel idea of dark matter superfluidity which ameliorates the short scale puzzles present in LCDM. In this scenario, dark matter particles thermalize in central regions of galaxies and form a superfluid. The superfluid phonons couple to baryons and as a result mediate the fifth force between them. Provided that the superfluid has a polytropic equation of state with appropriate exponent, the baryons located inside the superfluid core experience accelerations very similar to the ones of MOdified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND). I will conclude by discussing some of the phenomenological consequences of this paradigm.