The axion may help clean up the messy business of dark matter

In fact, axions belong to a much broader class of “ultra-light” dark matter particle candidates, which can have masses down to 10^-24 eV. This is multiple billions of times lighter than the WIMPs—and indeed most of the particles of the Standard Model.

That means axions and their friends act nothing like most of the particles of the Standard Model.

First off, it may not even be appropriate to refer to them as particles. They have such little mass that their de Broglie wavelength—the size of the quantum wave associated with every particle—can stretch into macroscopic proportions. In some cases, this wavelength can be a few meters across. In others, it’s comparable to a star or a solar system. In still others, a single axion “particle” can stretch across an entire galaxy.

In this view, the individual axion particles would be subsumed into a larger quantum wave, like an ocean of dark matter so large and vast that it doesn’t make sense to talk about its individual components.

And because axions are bosons, they can synchronize their quantum wave nature, becoming a distinct state of matter: a Bose-Einstein condensate. In a Bose-Einstein condensate, most of the particles share the same low-energy state. When this happens, the de Broglie wavelength is larger than the average separation between the particles, and the waves of the individual particles all add up together, creating, in essence, a super-particle.

This way, we may get axion “stars”—clumps of axions acting as a single particle. Some of these axion stars may be a few thousand kilometers across, wandering across interstellar space. Still others may be the size of galactic cores, which might explain an issue with the traditional WIMP picture.

The best description of dark matter in general is that it is “cold,” meaning that the individual particles do not move fast compared to the speed of light. This allows them to gravitationally interact and form the seeds of structures like galaxies and clusters. But this process is a bit too efficient. According to simulations, cold dark matter tends to form more small, sub-galactic clumps than we observe, and it tends to make the cores of galaxies much, much denser than we see.