PyUltraLight: A pseudo-spectral solver for ultralight dark matter dynamics

Abstract

The International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) logo PyUltraLight: a pseudo-spectral solver for ultralight dark matter dynamics Faber Edwards, Emily Kendall, Shaun Hotchkiss and Richard Easther Published 16 October 2018 • © 2018 IOP Publishing Ltd and Sissa Medialab Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, Volume 2018, October 2018 DownloadArticle PDF References 52 Total downloads 55 total citations on Dimensions.Article has an altmetric score of 11 Turn on MathJax Get permission to re-use this article Share this article Share this content via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Google+ Share on Mendeley Article information Abstract PYULTRALIGHT simulates the dynamics of ultralight dark matter in a non-expanding background. PYULTRALIGHT can describe the evolution of several interacting ultralight dark matter halos or one or more halos orbiting a central, fixed Newtonian potential, the latter scenario corresponding to dwarf galaxies orbiting a massive central galaxy. We verify PYULTRALIGHT by showing that it reproduces qualitative dynamical features of previously published simulations and demonstrate that it has excellent energy-conservation properties. PYULTRALIGHT is implemented in a Python-based Jupyter notebook, solving the Schrödinger-Poisson equation governing ultralight scalar field dark matter dynamics in the non-relativistic regime using a symmetrised split-step pseudospectral algorithm. The notebook interface makes it simple to specify simulation parameters and visualise the resulting output but performance-critical routines are managed via calls to computationally efficient compiled libraries. PYULTRALIGHT runs on standard desktop hardware with support for shared memory mutlithreading and is available on GitHub.