Lyman-alpha forests cool warm dark matter

By Julien Baur, N. Palanque-Delabrouille, C. Yéche, C. Magneville, M. Viel. 2015

194 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The free-streaming of keV-scale particles impacts structure growth on scales that are probed by the Lyman-alpha forest of distant quasars. Using an unprecedentedly large sample of medium-resolution QSO spectra from the ninth data release of SDSS, along with a state-of-the-art set of hydrodynamical simulations to model the Lyman-alpha forest in the non-linear regime, we issue one of the tightest bounds to date, from Ly-α data alone, on pure dark matter particles: mX>4.09 keV (95% CL) for early decoupled thermal relics such as a hypothetical gravitino, and correspondingly ms>24.4 keV (95% CL) for a non-resonantly produced right-handed neutrino. This limit depends on the value on ns, and Planck measures a higher value of ns than SDSS-III/BOSS. Our bounds thus change slightly when Ly-α data are combined with CMB data from Planck 2016. The limits shift to mX>2.96 keV (95% CL) and ms>16.0 keV (95% CL). Thanks to SDSS-III data featuring smaller uncertainties and covering a larger redshift range than SDSS-I data, our bounds confirm the most stringent results established by previous works and are further at odds with a purely non-resonantly produced sterile neutrino as dark matter.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/18c63fb084cb9f1627c318c637aab0032325d3d4

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Citations in the corpus

“Non-cold” dark matter at small scales: a general approach (2017, methodology): “re therefore excluded at 98% C.L. by our analyses. { 15 { sources [83]. Therefore, the Lyman-forest has been used widely as a probe of the matter power spectrum on scales 0:5 Mpc=h<<100 Mpc=h [34,35,37]. Instead of computing absolute bounds, which can only be obtained through a full statistica”
Constraints on neutrino masses from Lyman-alpha forest power spectrum with BOSS and XQ-100 (2017, methodology): “P(k) of this paper P(k) of [2] BOSS alone [3] mX & 4.”
Constraints from Ly-α forests on non-thermal dark matter including resonantly-produced sterile neutrinos (2017, methodology): “In [25], we explored the first of these 4 listed scenarios and have concluded that to be consistent with Ly-α forest data from SDSS-III, the pure WDM sterile neutrino has to be more massive than 24.”
Sterile neutrinos in cosmology (2017, background): “One of the most potentially powerful constraints on the matter power spectrum at small scales affected by WDM is the clustering of gas as measured along the line of sight to distant quasars in the Lyman-α forest [170, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181].”
Using the Full Power of the Cosmic Microwave Background to Probe Axion Dark Matter (2017, background): “…from the modeling of the temperature evolution of the intergalactic medium (Hui et al. 2017; Garzilli et al. 2015), but can be used to place the strongest constraints on deviations from CDM on small scales (e.g. Viel et al. 2005; Baur et al. 2016; Iršič et al. 2017a; Armengaud et al. 2017).”
New Constraints on the free-streaming of warm dark matter from intermediate and small scale Lyman-$\alpha$ forest data (2017, background): “Indeed, this is why lower resolution surveys are also able to put bounds on the WDM free-streaming scale [8].”
Constraints on neutrinos and WDM Hints, neutrino bounds and WDM constraints from SDSS DR14 Lyman-$\alpha$ and Planck full-survey data (2019, methodology): “Therefore, for WDM studies, we account for changes in the redshift of reionization by adding a nuisance term that reproduces the impact of zreio on the redshift and mode dependence of the flux power spectrum, as was done in [10].”
The Dawn of FIMP Dark Matter: A Review of Models and Constraints (2017, background): “16 keV if the DW-produced sterile neutrinos account for all DM [348].”