Gravitationally Misaligned Ultralight Dark Matter and Implications for Neutron Stars

Abstract

We examine the possibility that dark matter (DM) may be an ultralight scalar that was misaligned via non-minimal coupling to gravity, in the early Universe. For a certain regime of scalar masses, gravitational effects in neutron stars could place interesting bounds on the viable parameter space of the model, even in the absence of non-gravitational interactions between DM and ordinary matter.