Tunneling and tidal stripping in multifield ultralight dark matter halos

Abstract: Tidal stripping is a key feature of the evolution of dark matter (DM) halos, and has major implications for the population of low-mass galaxies. In the case of ultralight DM, tidal stripping proceeds not only classically, at the tidal radius, but also via a process analogous to quantum tunneling by long-wavelength particles out of the potential of a subhalo. This modified tidal stripping behavior leads to tight constraints on the particle mass as a function of subhalo and host properties. As many models of ultralight DM predict several independent species, it is crucial to understand how these constraints can be generalized to multifield halos with different particle masses. However, numerical challenges make it difficult to directly study the tunneling process in all but the simplest multifield scenarios. We introduce a simplified approach based on semiclassical methods that entirely sidesteps the most difficult aspects of the numerical problem, and we apply this to the study of tunneling in multifield halos. Our results significantly clarify the physics of tidal stripping for ultralight DM halos even in the single-field case: we provide first-principles derivations of features of the tunneling rate previously suggested by empirical fits. We then evaluate stability bounds on two-field halos for the first time, for a wide range of density and particle mass ratios. We show that for particular parameter combinations, the stability bounds in the two-field case can be somewhat relaxed relative to the single-field case, but for much of the parameter space, the constraints become more stringent. We discuss the path towards probing realistic multifield ultralight DM halos.