Exploring the wave nature of axion dark matter using cosmological and astrophysical phenomena.

In the axion project, we are interested in constraining the fraction of dark matter that decays, and the redshift of energy injection from CMB anisotropy measurements using CLASS. Given we were not able to use CLASS to solve for the ionization history, we have since created a code in Mathematica that is able to achieve this. We are now adding the analytic form of the ionization history after the redshift of energy injection into CLASS and varying both the redshift of reionization and the redshift of axion star explosions. We should be able to run an MCMC analysis soon using a revised version of CLASS.

In the second project, we want to understand if we are able to reconstruct the density profiles for real dwarf spheroidal galaxies using wave solutions to the Schrodinger-Poisson (SP) equations, where the gravitational potential has been sourced by the halo itself. From the quality of the reproduced density profile, we can constrain the axion mass. We have an optimization method in place that reproduces the desired density profile. We are now trying to use real data of dSphs.