The properties of warm dark matter haloes

By M. Lovell, Carlos S. Frenk, V. Eke, Adrian Jenkins, Liang Gao, Tom Theuns. 2013

362 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Well-motivated elementary particle candidates for the dark matter, such as the sterile neutrino, behave as warm dark matter (WDM). For particle masses of order a keV, free streaming produces a cutoff in the linear fluctuation power spectrum at a scale corresponding to dwarf galaxies. We investigate the abundance and structure of WDM haloes and subhaloes on these scales using high resolution cosmological N-body simulations of galactic haloes of mass similar to the Milky Way’s. On scales larger than the free-streaming cutoff, the initial conditions have the same power spectrum and phases as one of the cold dark matter (CDM) haloes previously simulated by Springel et al as part of the Virgo consortium Aquarius project. We have simulated four haloes with WDM particle masses in the range 1.4 − 2.3 keV and, for one case, we have carried out further simulations at varying resolution. N-body simulations in which the power spectrum cutoff is resolved are known to undergo artificial fragmentation in filaments producing spurious clumps which, for small masses (< 10 7 M ⊙ in our case) outnumber genuine haloes. We have developed a robust algorithm to identify these spurious objects and remove them from our halo catalogues. We find that the WDM subhalo mass function is suppressed by well over an order magnitude relative to the CDM case for masses < 10 9 M ⊙ . Requiring that there should be at least as many subhaloes as there are observed satellites in the Milky Way leads to a conservative lower limit to the (thermal equivalent) WDM particle mass of ∼ 1.5keV. WDM haloes and subhaloes have cuspy density distributions that are well described by NFW or Einasto profiles. Their central densities are lower for lower WDM particle masses and none of the models we have considered suffer from the “too big to fail” problem recently highlighted by Boylan-Kolchin et al.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6bb827198a32d62cd775d64a78b97f16dc76d94a

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

“Non-cold” dark matter at small scales: a general approach (2017, methodology): “7 · 10(12) M /h [82] and by considering subhalos with masses Msub ≥ 10(8) M /h, we can obtain the number of subhalos Nsub predicted by our models, by simply integrating Eq.”
The milky way total mass profile as inferred from Gaia DR2 (2019, background): “…such as the mass of the DM particle and its interaction cross-section (e.g. Peñarrubia et al. 2010; Vogelsberger et al. 2012; Kennedy et al. 2014; Lovell et al. 2014; Cautun & Frenk 2017; Kahlhoefer et al. 2019), and also constrain galaxy formation models (e.g. Sawala et al. 2016a,b; Bose et al.…”
Core formation in dwarf haloes with self-interacting dark matter: no fine-tuning necessary (2014, background): “…power spectrum is non-standard (Zentner & Bullock, 2002; Polisensky & Ricotti, 2014; Garrison-Kimmel et al., 2014c) or the dark matter is warm rather than cold (Anderhalden et al., 2013; Lovell et al., 2014; Horiuchi et al., 2014) then the central densities of dark matter halos would decrease.”
Disruption of Dark Matter Substructure: Fact or Fiction? (2017, background): “…matter models; if dark matter is warm (WDM), rather than cold, free-streaming and enhanced tidal disruption, will cause a significantly re- ⋆ E-mail: frank.vandenbosch@yale.edu duced abundance of low mass subhaloes (e.g., Knebe et al. 2008; Lovell et al. 2014; Colín et al. 2015; Bose et al. 2016).”
The local dark matter density (2014, methodology): “Lovell et al. (2014) propose a much less computationally expensive post-processing algorithm to prune spurious structures from standard N -body simulations.”
Milky Way Satellite Census. II. Galaxy–Halo Connection Constraints Including the Impact of the Large Magellanic Cloud (2019, background): “…abundances to constrain a free-streaming cutoff in- 8 For many MW satellites, this will likely require spectroscopy with giant segmented mirror telescopes (Simon et al. 2019). duced by warm dark matter (e.g., Macciò & Fontanot 2010; Lovell et al. 2014; Kennedy et al. 2014; Jethwa et al. 2018).”
Gravitational probes of dark matter physics (2017, methodology): “he non-cold momentum distribution is dicult to map to non-linear scales. There have been recent technical advances in calculating transfer functions and removing numerical artifacts from simulations [438, 402, 188]. More work is needed on this subject. In summary, the key points of the astrophysics ”
Mining for Dark Matter Substructure: Inferring Subhalo Population Properties from Strong Lenses with Machine Learning (2019, background): “For example, warm dark matter introduces a lower cutoﬀ scale in the subhalo mass function (Bode et al. 2001) which can be parameterized and mapped onto the dark matter mass (Schneider et al. 2012; Lovell et al. 2014; Li et al. 2016; Birrer et al. 2017a).”
Too big to fail in the Local Group (2014, background): “…whether TBTF may be a result of the underlying cosmology of the Aquarius simulations, where TBTF was first identified, such as the adopted values of σ 8 and ns (Polisensky & Ricotti 2014) or the assumed coldness of the DM (Anderhalden et al. 2013; Lovell et al. 2014, and references therein).”
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).”
Constraints on Dark Matter Microphysics from the Milky Way Satellite Population (2019, positive): “In particular, we use the subhalo mass function from Lovell et al. (2014), which is fit to cosmological zoom-in simulations of thermal relic sterile neutrino WDM dN dM ∣∣∣∣ collisional = dN dM ∣∣∣∣ CDM ( 1 +γ Mhm M )−β , (7) where γ = 2.7, β = 0.99, M is the peak subhalo virial mass output by the…”
Small-Scale Challenges to the ΛCDM Paradigm (2017, background): “…a lower limit on the warm dark matter particle mass. Polisensky & Ricotti (2011) find this constraint is m > 2.3 keV (95% confidence) while Lovell et al. (2014) find m > 1.6 keV; these differences come from slightly different cosmologies, assumptions about the mass of the Milky Way’s dark…”
The mass–concentration–redshift relation of cold and warm dark matter haloes (2016, methodology): “We also use the latest suite of CDM and WDM simulations from the Aquarius Project (Lovell et al. 2014).”
Using the Milky Way satellites to study interactions between cold dark matter and radiation (2014, background): “In this scenario, one allows a small (but non-negligible) amount of free-streaming, which greatly reduces the expected number of satellites with respect to CDM (Lovell et al. 2014).”
Dark Matter Substructure in Numerical Simulations: A Tale of Discreteness Noise, Runaway Instabilities, and Artificial Disruption (2018, background): “…discriminators between different dark matter models; if dark matter is warm (WDM), rather than cold, free-streaming and enhanced tidal disruption, will cause a significantly reduced abundance of low mass subhaloes (e.g., Knebe et al. 2008; Lovell et al. 2014; Coĺın et al. 2015; Bose et al. 2016).”
The unexpected diversity of dwarf galaxy rotation curves (2015, neutral): “Available simulation data are sparse but suggest that the scatter in structural properties at fixed halo mass is no larger for alternative dark matter models than for CDM (e.g. Rocha et al. 2013; Lovell et al. 2014, for SIDM and WDM, respectively).”