Speaker
Description
Despite the success of LCDM in explaining cosmological observables on scales spanning many orders of magnitude in both time and space, there are ingredients central to the model that are completely unknown, such as dark matter (DM), the dominant matter component of our universe. A wide range of DM candidates have therefore been proposed over the years, motivated by fundamental theories beyond the Standard Model, and discrepancies between predictions of LCDM and observations. In this talk I will focus on scalar field candidates of DM, in particular the phenomenology of self-interacting scalar field DM that have been produced from an initial standard cold DM (CDM)-like phase. By solving the linear equations for such a DM model using a Boltzmann code, large-scale observables, such as the cosmic microwave background and the matter power spectrum, can be computed and used to place constraints on the phenomenology of the transition between the CDM and scalar field DM phases.
