Constraining the mass of light bosonic dark matter using SDSS Lyman-α forest

By Eric Armengaud, N. Palanque-Delabrouille, C. Yéche, D. Marsh, Julien Baur. 2017

251 citations recorded by the source corpus.

If a significant fraction of the dark matter in the Universe is made of an ultra-light scalar field, named fuzzy dark matter (FDM) with a mass of the order of 10^−22 − 10^−21 eV, then its de Broglie wavelength is large enough to impact the physics of large-scale structure formation. In particular, the associated cut-off in the linear matter power spectrum modifies the structure of the intergalactic medium (IGM) at the scales probed by the Lyman-α forest of distant quasars. We study this effect by making use of dedicated cosmological simulations which take into account the hydrodynamics of the IGM. We explore heuristically the amplitude of quantum pressure for the FDM masses considered here and conclude that quantum effects should not modify significantly the non-linear evolution of matter density at the scales relevant to the measured Lyman-α flux power, and for m_a ≳ 10^ − 22 eV. We derive a scaling law between m_a and the mass of the well-studied thermal warm dark matter model that is best adapted to the Lyman-α forest data, and differs significantly from the one inferred by a simple linear extrapolation. By comparing FDM simulations with the Lyman-α flux power spectra determined from the BOSS survey, and marginalizing over relevant nuisance parameters, we exclude FDM masses in the range 10^ − 22 ≲ m_a < 2.3 × 10^ − 21 eV at 95 per cent CL. Adding higher resolution Lyman-α spectra extends the exclusion range up to 2.9 × 10^−21 eV. This provides a significant constraint on FDM models tailored to solve the ‘small-scale problems’ of ΛCDM.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/35f6d5f9a9c1dbd4bf37ec21d3656a96950d0516

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Citations in the corpus

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).”
The Simons Observatory: science goals and forecasts (2018, background): “…oscillates, and the ULAs transition from behaving more like scalar field dark energy to being a darkmatter-like cosmological component, which has strong cosmological implications for structure formation (Schive et al. 2016; Armengaud et al. 2017; Poulin et al. 2018; Fairbairn et al. 2018).”
The one-dimensional power spectrum from the SDSS DR14 Lyα forests (2018, background): “Combined with dedicated hydrodynamic simulations [11–13], the Lyα flux power spectrum can allow one to set constraints on the mass of neutrinos [14–18], on dark radiation [19], on the possible existence of sterile neutrinos [20, 21] or on the nature of dark matter [22–24].”
Constraints on Dark Matter Microphysics from the Milky Way Satellite Population (2019, methodology): “We translate our Mhm constraint into a lower limit on FDM mass mφ using the mWDM–mφ relation from Armengaud et al. (2017) in Equation (8), which gives mφ = 1.3×10−21 ( Ωm 0.25 )0.95( h 0.7 )1.9( Mhm 109M )−0.71 eV.”
Constraints on neutrinos and WDM Hints, neutrino bounds and WDM constraints from SDSS DR14 Lyman-$\alpha$ and Planck full-survey data (2019, background): “Recent data from the Lyman-α flux power spectrum provide some of the strongest existing bounds on the mass of WDM [10–14].”