Constraints on Warm Dark Matter from Cosmological Reionization

By R. Barkana, Zoltán Haiman, Jeremiah P. Ostriker. 2001

140 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study the constraints that high-redshift structure formation in the universe places on warm dark matter (WDM) dominated cosmological models. We modify the extended Press-Schechter formalism to derive the halo mass function in WDM models. We show that our predictions agree with recent numerical simulations at low redshift over the halo masses of interest. Applying our model to galaxy formation at high redshift, we find that the loss of power on small scales, together with the delayed collapse of low-mass objects, results in strong limits on the root-mean-square velocity dispersion vrms,0 of the WDM particles at redshift zero. For fermions decoupling while relativistic, these limits are equivalent to constraints on the mass mX of the particles. The presence of a ≈4 × 109 M ☉ supermassive black hole at redshift 5.8, believed to power the quasar SDSS 1044-1215, implies mX ≳ 0.5 keV (or vrms,0 ≲ 0.10 km s-1), assuming that the quasar is unlensed and radiating at or below the Eddington limit. Reionization by redshift 5.8 also implies a limit on mX. If high-redshift galaxies produce ionizing photons with an efficiency similar to their redshift-three counterparts, we find mX ≳ 1.2 keV (or vrms,0 ≲ 0.03 s-1). However, given the uncertainties in current measurements from the proximity effect of the ionizing background at redshift three, values of mX as low as 0.75 keV (or vrms,0 = 0.06 s-1) are not ruled out. The limit weakens further to mX ≳ 0.4 keV (or vrms,0 ≲ 0.14 s-1), if, instead, the ionizing-photon production efficiency is 10 times greater at high redshift, but this limit will tighten considerably if reionization is shown in the future to have occurred at higher redshifts. WDM models with mX ≲ 1 keV (or vrms,0 ≳ 0.04 s-1) produce a low-luminosity cutoff in the high-redshift galaxy luminosity function that is directly detectable with the Next Generation Space Telescope, and which serves as a direct constraint on mX.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/75818afd4fc53027c783e1df3faffe411f050166

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Citations in the corpus

Sterile neutrinos in cosmology (2017, unknown): “CDM is the formation of structure at high redshift probed by galaxy number counts [186] as well as reionization [187].”
Direct Detection of Warm Dark Matter in the X-Ray (2001, unknown): “Such considerations corroborate the Lyman-α forest constraints and also favor a WDM particle to have a rest mass greater than 750 eV (Barkana et al. 2001).”
Constraining galaxy formation and cosmology with the conditional luminosity function of galaxies (2002, background): “In order to have a significant effect, we find that the WDM particles must have a mass of the order of mX <∼ 0.8keV, which is already the lower limit set by a number of other observational constraints (Narayanan et al. 2000; Dalcanton & Hogan 2001; Barkana et al. 2001).”
Halo mass function and the free streaming scale (2013, methodology): “Their model is based on work of Barkana et al. (2001), who included the effect of velocities in an isolated simulation of spherical collapse.”
Fundamental physics with the Square Kilometre Array (2018, unknown): “8 and 9 of Barkana et al., 2001).”
Cosmology and Fundamental Physics with the Euclid Satellite (2012, background): “Warm dark matter (WDM) suppresses the growth of structure in the early universe producing a measurable effect on the small-scale matter power spectrum [143, 67, 87].”
THE VELOCITY FUNCTION IN THE LOCAL ENVIRONMENT FROM ΛCDM AND ΛWDM CONSTRAINED SIMULATIONS (2009, background): “Above the cut-off scale the differences vanish (e.g. Bode et al. 2001; Barkana et al. 2001).”
Gravitational probes of dark matter physics (2017, background): “Primordial deviations may lead to time-dependent changes in the growth of structure relative to CDM, notably that structure forms later when there exists a cut-off in the matter power spectrum [165, 199, 200].”