Measuring the boson mass of fuzzy dark matter with stellar proper motions

Abstract Fuzzy dark matter (FDM) is among the most suitable candidates to replace WIMPs and to resolve the puzzling mystery of dark matter (DM). A galactic DM halo made of these ultralight bosonic particles leads to the formation of a solitonic core surrounded by quantum interference patterns that, on average, reproduce a Navarro-Frenk-White-like mass density profile in the outskirts of the halo. The structure of such a core is determined once the boson mass and the total mass of the halo are set. We investigated the capability of future astrometric Theia-like missions to detect the properties of such a halo within the FDM model, namely the boson mass and the core radius. To this aim, we built mock catalogs containing three-dimensional positions and velocities of stars within a target dwarf galaxy. We exploited these catalogs using a Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm and found that measuring the proper motion of at least 2000 stars within the target galaxy, with uncertainty <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" overflow="scroll"> <mml:mrow> <mml:msub> <mml:mi>σ</mml:mi> <mml:mtext>v</mml:mtext> </mml:msub> <mml:mtext>⩽</mml:mtext> <mml:mn>3</mml:mn> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> km s −1 on the velocity components, will constrain the boson mass and the core radius with 3% accuracy. Furthermore, the transition between the solitonic core and the outermost NFW-like density profile could be detected with an uncertainty of 7%. Such results would not only help to confirm the existence of FDM, but they would also be useful for alleviating the current tension between galactic and cosmological estimations of the boson mass, or demonstrating the need for multiple particles with a broad mass spectrum as naturally arise String Axiverse.