Gravitational cooling of self-gravitating Bose-Condensates

Abstract

Equilibrium configurations for a self-gravitating scalar field with self-interaction are constructed. The corresponding Schr\"odinger-Poisson (SP) system is solved using finite differences assuming spherical symmetry. It is shown that equilibrium configurations of the SP system are late-time attractor solutions for initially quite arbitrary density profiles, which relax and virialize through the emission of scalar field bursts; a process dubbed gravitational cooling. Among other potential applications, these results indicate that scalar field dark matter models (in its different flavors) tolerate the introduction of a self-interaction term in the SP equations. This study can be useful in exploring models in which dark matter in galaxies is not point-like.