Constraining self-interacting dark matter with the Milky Way’s dwarf spheroidals

By J. Zavala, M. Vogelsberger, UW MatthewG.Walker, Pi, HarvardCfA. 2012

368 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Self-Interacting Dark Matter is an attractive alternative to the Cold Dark Matter paradigm only if it is able to substantially reduce the central densities of dwarf-size haloes while keeping the densities and shapes of cluster-size haloes within current constraints. Given the seemingly stringent nature of the latter, it was thought for nearly a decade that Self-Interacting Dark Matter would be viable only if the cross section for self-scattering was strongly velocitydependent. However, it has recently been suggested that a constant cross section per unit mass of T=m 0:1cm 2 g 1 is sufficient to accomplish the desired effect. We explicitly investigate this claim using high resolution cosmological simulations of a Milky-Way size halo and find that, similarly to the Cold Dark Matter case, such cross section produces a population of massive subhaloes that is inconsistent with the kinematics of the classical dwarf spheroidals, in particular with the inferred slopes of the mass profiles of Fornax and Sculptor. This problem is resolved if T=m 1cm 2 g 1 at the dwarf spheroidal scales. Since this value is likely inconsistent with the halo shapes of several clusters, our results leave only a small window open for a velocity-independent Self-Interacting Dark Matter model to work as a distinct alternative to Cold Dark Matter.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0a2334e04729d5f67fe747fdbff7d2941b188447

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Citations in the corpus

A taste of dark matter: flavour constraints on pseudoscalar mediators (2014, neutral): “These constraints can be evaded if self-interactions are suppressed for large relative velocities [51, 52].”
Dwarf galaxies in CDM and SIDM with baryons: observational probes of the nature of dark matter (2014, methodology): “We will not quantify this here in detail, but we note that a similar effect was already found in VZL for the subhalo abundance of MW-like DM haloes.”
ETHOS - an effective theory of structure formation: dark matter physics as a possible explanation of the small-scale CDM problems (2015, methodology): “If the self-scattering cross section per unit mass is ∼ 1 cm2 g−1 at the scale of dwarf galaxies, SIDM models can solve both the CC and TBTF problems (Vogelsberger et al. 2012; Rocha et al. 2013; Zavala et al. 2013).”
Understanding the shape and diversity of dwarf galaxy rotation curves in ΛCDM (2016, background): “…could point to new physics, for example selfinteracting or scalar-field dark matter models (e.g. Spergel & Steinhardt 2000; Alcubierre et al. 2002; Zavala et al. 2013; Elbert et al. 2014; Magaña & Matos 2012), or weakly relativistic warm dark matter (e.g. Bode et al. 2001; AvilaReese et al.…”
Mining for Dark Matter Substructure: Inferring Subhalo Population Properties from Strong Lenses with Machine Learning (2019, background): “…self-interactions (Spergel & Steinhardt 2000; Yoshida et al. 2000; Dav´e et al. 2001; Col´ın et al. 2002; Vogels-berger et al. 2012; Peter et al. 2013; Zavala et al. 2013; Kaplinghat et al. 2014, 2016; Kamada et al. 2017; Elbert et al. 2018; Vogelsberger et al. 2019; Kahlhoefer et al. 2019;…”
Core formation in dwarf haloes with self-interacting dark matter: no fine-tuning necessary (2014, methodology): “The potential for significant velocity scaling in the SIDM energy-exchange cross section has motivated Vogelsberger et al. (2012) and Zavala et al. (2013) to explicitly run zoom simulations of Milky Way-size hosts using SIDM with velocity-dependent σ/m values tuned to evade bounds on cluster scales…”
Bound-state formation for thermal relic dark matter and unitarity (2014, neutral): “2 barn/GeV [45–48].”
Gravitational probes of dark matter physics (2017, background): “For velocity-dependent cross sections, cores can show up for only a narrow range of halo mass, leaving halos outside this mass range relatively unperturbed with respect to CDM [215, 64, 162, 216, 119, 190].”