• Accepted Paper

Constraining self-interacting scalar field dark matter with strong gravitational lensing in cluster scale?

Raquel Galazo García, Eric Jullo, Emmanuel Nezri, and Marceau Limousin

Phys. Rev. D - Accepted 13 October, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/651s-h6v3

Abstract

We study solitonic cores in the Thomas–Fermi regime of self-interacting scalar field dark matter (SI-SFDM) and assess whether strong gravitational lensing by galaxy clusters can detect or constrain them. We build composite halo profiles that join a solitonic core to an outer NFW profile at fixed total mass, and compute their lensing signatures—the deflection angle and the excess surface mass density—for two halos of typical cluster scale, M200=2⋅1015 and $2\cdot10^{14}\,\rm M_\odot$. The soliton radius is fixed by the microphysics (m, λ4), while its mass is not fixed by these parameters but is constrained by the halo mass budget. Lensing constrains only the radius, and hence the combination λ4/m4; combined with the independent bound on the self-interaction cross section, this places an indirect upper bound on the scalar field mass, m≲few×10−5~eV, and correspondingly λ4∼10−18. Taking the NFW profile as reference, we quantify the deflection-angle difference produced by the soliton and confront our predictions with the cluster A2390 and with the stacked DES weak-lensing profile to assess when an SI-SFDM core can be distinguished from NFW.

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