Could galactic magnetic fields be generated by charged ultra-light boson dark matter?

Abstract

Abstract We study the possibility that large-scale magnetic fields observed in galaxies could be produced by a dark matter halo made of charged ultra-light bosons, that arise as excitations of a complex scalar field described by the Klein–Gordon equation with local U(1) symmetry which introduces electromagnetic fields that minimally couple to the complex scalar current and act as dark virtual photons. These virtual photons have an unknown coupling constant with real virtual photons. We constrain the final interaction using the observed magnetic fields in galaxies. We use classical solutions of the Klein–Gordon–Maxwell system to describe the density profile of dark matter and magnetic fields in galaxies. We consider two cases assuming spherical and dipolar spatial symmetries. For the LSB spherical galaxy F563-V2, we test the sensitivity of the predicted rotation curves in the charged Scalar Field Dark Matter (cSFDM) model to variations of the electromagnetic coupling and using the Fisher matrix error estimator, we set a constraint over that coupling by requiring that theoretical rotation curves lay inside the $$1\sigma $$1σ confidence region of observational data. We find that cSFDM haloes generate magnetic fields of the order of $$\mu G$$μG and reproduce the observed rotation curves of F563-V2 if the ultra-light boson has a charge $$\sim <10^{-13}e$$∼<10-13e for the monopole-like density profile and $$\sim <10^{-14}e$$∼<10-14e for the dipole-like one.