“Non-cold” dark matter at small scales: a general approach

By Riccardo Murgia, A. Merle, M. Viel, M. Totzauer, A. Schneider. 2017

141 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Structure formation at small cosmological scales provides an important frontier for dark matter (DM) research. Scenarios with small DM particle masses, large momenta or hidden interactions tend to suppress the gravitational clustering at small scales. The details of this suppression depend on the DM particle nature, allowing for a direct link between DM models and astrophysical observations. However, most of the astrophysical constraints obtained so far refer to a very specific shape of the power suppression, corresponding to thermal warm dark matter (WDM), i.e., candidates with a Fermi-Dirac or Bose-Einstein momentum distribution. In this work we introduce a new analytical fitting formula for the power spectrum, which is simple yet flexible enough to reproduce the clustering signal of large classes of non-thermal DM models, which are not at all adequately described by the oversimplified notion of WDM . We show that the formula is able to fully cover the parameter space of sterile neutrinos (whether resonantly produced or from particle decay), mixed cold and warm models, fuzzy dark matter, as well as other models suggested by effective theory of structure formation (ETHOS). Based on this fitting formula, we perform a large suite of N-body simulations and we extract important nonlinear statistics, such as the matter power spectrum and the halo mass function. Finally, we present first preliminary astrophysical constraints, based on linear theory, from both the number of Milky Way satellites and the Lyman-α forest. This paper is a first step towards a general and comprehensive modeling of small-scale departures from the standard cold DM model.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3d9e553f51d23f361f129f4a4f37c6107f95a3b7

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

Citations in the corpus

Constraints from Ly-α forests on non-thermal dark matter including resonantly-produced sterile neutrinos (2017, methodology): “Several other works [24, 32, 33] used the bounds on thermal relic WDM and extrapolated the expected flux power spectrum in the Ly-α forest using a correction from the linear matter power spectrum (in [33], the matching was also performed at the level of the non-linear power spectrum obtained from DM”
New physics in light of the H0 tension: An alternative view (2019, unknown): “[248–266] for examples of such models.”
Gravitational probes of dark matter physics (2017, background): “[439, 405, 440]) should be used in order to minimize the computational overhead for theory predictions.”