Wave Cold Dark Matter Can Reproduce the Radial Acceleration Relation in X-ray Elliptical Galaxies
Abstract
Wave cold dark matter (wave CDM) is a well-motivated variant within the collisionless CDM paradigm, in which the de~Broglie wavelengths of ultralight bosons become relevant on galactic scales. While many of the previous tests of wave CDM have focused on small-scale tensions involving solitonic cores and certain soliton--halo relations in galaxies, the radial acceleration relation (RAR) provides a complementary test: for a given baryonic mass distribution, it probes whether the DM halo can reproduce the observed total gravitational field. In this work we test wave CDM against the RAR using eight X-ray elliptical galaxies from the compilation of Lelli et al. We perform a suite of 3D Schrödinger--Poisson simulations and evolve the wave-CDM halos to virialized quasi-stationary states. For each galaxy and each adopted boson mass, we select the realization whose final snapshot most closely matches the empirical RAR. We find that the selected wave-CDM realizations for these elliptical galaxies can reproduce the RAR without including baryonic feedback or dark-matter self-interactions. At the boson mass ma=10−23eV, the combined fit to the eight galaxies gives a0=1.19×10−10 m s−2, consistent with the canonical value inferred from disk galaxies. When the boson mass is varied over 3× 10−24 eV ≤ ma ≤ 2× 10−23 eV, the best-fit value of a0 changes by only ∼ 11%, and this variation shows no systematic trend with ma. This insensitivity to boson mass arises because, over the radial range relevant for the RAR, the virialized halos are supported mainly by their velocity field, whereas the boson-mass-dependent quantum-pressure term is dynamically subdominant. These results show that wave CDM can reproduce the RAR in elliptical galaxies, and provide a new galactic-scale test of the model beyond the previous focus on solitonic cores.
Versions
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BibTeX
@misc{meng2026wave,
title = {{Wave Cold Dark Matter Can Reproduce the Radial Acceleration Relation in X-ray Elliptical Galaxies}},
author = {Runyu Meng and Xiaobo Dong},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.18969},
eprint = {2610.18969},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18969},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Wave Cold Dark Matter Can Reproduce the Radial Acceleration Relation in X-ray Elliptical Galaxies
AU - Runyu Meng
AU - Xiaobo Dong
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/13
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.18969
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18969
AB - Wave cold dark matter (wave CDM) is a well-motivated variant within the collisionless CDM paradigm, in which the de~Broglie wavelengths of ultralight bosons become relevant on galactic scales. While many of the previous tests of wave CDM have focused on small-scale tensions involving solitonic cores and certain soliton--halo relations in galaxies, the radial acceleration relation (RAR) provides a complementary test: for a given baryonic mass distribution, it probes whether the DM halo can reproduce the observed total gravitational field. In this work we test wave CDM against the RAR using eight X-ray elliptical galaxies from the compilation of Lelli et al. We perform a suite of 3D Schrödinger--Poisson simulations and evolve the wave-CDM halos to virialized quasi-stationary states. For each galaxy and each adopted boson mass, we select the realization whose final snapshot most closely matches the empirical RAR. We find that the selected wave-CDM realizations for these elliptical galaxies can reproduce the RAR without including baryonic feedback or dark-matter self-interactions. At the boson mass m_a=10^−23eV, the combined fit to the eight galaxies gives a_0=1.19×10^−10 m s^−2, consistent with the canonical value inferred from disk galaxies. When the boson mass is varied over 3× 10^−24 eV ≤ m_a ≤ 2× 10^−23 eV, the best-fit value of a_0 changes by only ∼ 11%, and this variation shows no systematic trend with m_a. This insensitivity to boson mass arises because, over the radial range relevant for the RAR, the virialized halos are supported mainly by their velocity field, whereas the boson-mass-dependent quantum-pressure term is dynamically subdominant. These results show that wave CDM can reproduce the RAR in elliptical galaxies, and provide a new galactic-scale test of the model beyond the previous focus on solitonic cores.
ER -