ETHOS—an effective theory of structure formation: From dark particle physics to the matter distribution of the Universe

By F. Cyr-Racine, K. Sigurdson, J. Zavala, T. Bringmann, M. Vogelsberger, Christoph Pfrommer Harvard, Caltech, Ias Princeton, Ubc, D. C. Centre and 3 more. 2015

213 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We formulate an effective theory of structure formation (ETHOS) that enables cosmological structure formation to be computed in almost any microphysical model of dark matter physics. This framework maps the detailed microphysical theories of particle dark matter interactions into the physical effective parameters that shape the linear matter power spectrum and the self-interaction transfer cross section of nonrelativistic dark matter. These are the input to structure formation simulations, which follow the evolution of the cosmological and galactic dark matter distributions. Models with similar effective parameters in ETHOS but with different dark particle physics would nevertheless result in similar dark matter distributions. We present a general method to map an ultraviolet complete or effective field theory of low-energy dark matter physics into parameters that affect the linear matter power spectrum and carry out this mapping for several representative particle models. We further propose a simple but useful choice for characterizing the dark matter self-interaction transfer cross section that parametrizes self-scattering in structure formation simulations. Taken together, these effective parameters in ETHOS allow the classification of dark matter theories according to their structure formation properties rather than their intrinsic particle properties, paving the way for future simulations to span the space of viable dark matter physics relevant for structure formation.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/51cb1a397e6fb2eab46d37eebf1b3ec705be8283

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Citations in the corpus

Using the Full Power of the Cosmic Microwave Background to Probe Axion Dark Matter (2017, methodology): “…models for DM beyond CDM, including limits on the mass of standard model neutrinos (Planck Collaboration et al. 2016b), thermal axions (Archidiacono et al. 2013), DM interactions (Wilkinson et al. 2014b; Wilkinson et al. 2014a), and generalized models (Cyr-Racine et al. 2016; Thomas et al. 2016).”
“Non-cold” dark matter at small scales: a general approach (2017, methodology): “We thus consider our approach to be easily extendable to basically cover the same range of models as ETHOS does.”
CMB-S4 Science Case, Reference Design, and Project Plan (2019, background): “[294] for a detailed derivation of the relevant Boltzmann equations).”
Interacting dark sector and precision cosmology (2017, methodology): “For other recent work on the subject see [25, 26].”
Small-Scale Challenges to the ΛCDM Paradigm (2017, background): “Such models produce results that are a hybrid between traditional WDM and SIDM with scale-invariant spectra (e.g. Cyr-Racine et al. 2016; Vogelsberger et al. 2016).”