Superfluid Dark Matter: A Review of Theory & Evidence

[Hornbein]

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1507.01019v1.pdf

What do you think? Not published yet, but one of the authors is a postdoc at Princeton and the other a Princeton PhD and prof at U Penn so they might know something.

As far as I know, the superfluid dark matter theory is deprecated because models of the early Universe don't form correctly with such low mass particles.

 

[Chalnoth]

As far as I know, the superfluid dark matter theory is deprecated because models of the early Universe don't form correctly with such low mass particles.

I don't think the low mass is a problem, but rather the temperature. If the particles are thermally-produced, then they can't be low-mass because then their temperature will be too high to explain observations. But axions aren't produced thermally: they are produced by a different process that results in large numbers of low-mass particles at very near 0K temperature.

As for this paper, it's a fascinating idea. A quick skim of the paper makes it seem like a pretty solid piece of work. As with any speculative idea, though, it will need further study and would require multiple sets of independent data to confirm.