http://arxiv.org/abs/1512.00108
If the dark matter consists of axions, gravity can cause them to coalesce into axion stars, which are stable gravitationally bound Bose-Einstein condensates of axions. In the previously known axion stars, gravity and the attractive force between pairs of axions are balanced by the kinetic pressure.If the axion mass energy is $mc^2= 10^{-4}$ eV, these dilute axion stars have a maximum mass of about $10^{-14} M_\odot$. We point out that there are also dense axion stars in which gravity is balanced by the mean-field pressure of the axion condensate. We study axion stars using the leading term in a systematically improvable approximation to the effective potential of the nonrelativistic effective field theory for axions. Using the Thomas-Fermi approximation in which the kinetic pressure is neglected, we find a sequence of new branches of axion stars in which gravity is balanced by the mean-field interaction energy of the axion condensate. If $mc^2 = 10^{-4}$ eV, the first branch of these dense axion stars has mass ranging from about $10^{-11} M_\odot$ to about $M_\odot$.
E. Braaten, A. Mohapatra and H. Zhang
Tue, 15 Dec 15
47/87
Comments: 5 pages, 2 figures
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