The warm dark matter halo mass function below the cut-off scale

By R. Angulo, Oliver Hahn, Tom Abel Cefca, Kipac, Stanford University, Eth, Zurich. 2013

134 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Warm Dark Matter (WDM) cosmologies are a viable alternative to the Cold Dark Matter (CDM) scenario. Unfortunately, an accurate scrutiny of the WDM predictions with N-body simulations has proven difficult due to numerical artefacts.Here, we report on cosmological simulations that, for the first time, are devoid of those problems, and thus, are able to accurately resolve the WDM halo mass function well below the cut-off. We discover a complex picture, with perturbations at different evolutionary stages populating different ranges in the halo mass function. On the smallest mass scales we can resolve, identified objects are typically centres of filaments that are starting to collapse. On intermediate mass scales, objects typically correspond to fluctuations that have collapsed and are in the process of relaxation, whereas the high mass end is dominated by objects similar to haloes identified in CDM simulations. We then explicitly show how the formation of lowmass haloes is suppressed, which translates into a strong cut-off in the halo mass function. This disfavours some analytic formulations that predict a halo mass function that would extend well below the free streaming mass. We argue for a more detailed exploration of the formation of the smallest structures expected to form in a given cosmology, which, we foresee, will advance our overall understanding of structure formation.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/62a23cb4da2ce3cb026428574109785f16ff1dc1

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Citations in the corpus

ETHOS - an effective theory of structure formation: dark matter physics as a possible explanation of the small-scale CDM problems (2015, background): “This cutoff shape appears to accurately describe the abundance of halos seeded by primordial power rather than artificial (numerical) power due to particle discreteness effects (Wang & White 2007; Angulo et al. 2013)2.”
Cosmology and Fundamental Physics with the Euclid Satellite (2012, unknown): “One can then either i) run simulations [194, 219, 1268, 1222, 335, 1209, 1056, 161, 68, 1073], ii) use the halo model [1107, 1056, 437] or iii) a fit analogous to Equation 2.”
The stellar mass-halo mass relation of isolated field dwarfs : a critical test of ΛCDM at the edge of galaxy formation (2016, background): “5 There is a known problem in the literature with the formation of spurious halos at the resolution limit in WDM simulations (e.g. Wang & White 2007; Hahn et al. 2013; Angulo et al. 2013; Lovell et al. 2014; Hobbs et al. 2015).”
WHY BARYONS MATTER: THE KINEMATICS OF DWARF SPHEROIDAL SATELLITES (2012, background): “The primarily effect of WDM is to erase substructure below the free-streaming scale (Angulo et al. 2013; Benson et al. 2013).”
CONTRASTING GALAXY FORMATION FROM QUANTUM WAVE DARK MATTER, ψDM, WITH ΛCDM, USING PLANCK AND HUBBLE DATA (2015, background): “However, it is well known that the particle simulations with an initial power spectrum cutoff suffer from the formation of spurious halos, especially at low masses (Wang & White 2007; Angulo et al. 2013; Schneider et al. 2013).”