Cores in warm dark matter haloes: a Catch 22 problem

By A. Macciò, S. Paduroiu, Donnino Anderhalden, A. Schneider, B. Moore. 2012

215 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The free streaming of warm dark matter particles dampens the fluctuation spectrum, flattens the mass function of haloes and imprints a fine grained phase density limit for dark matter structures. The phase space density limit is expected to imprint a constant density core at the halo center on the contrary to what happens for cold dark matter. We explore these effects using high resolution simulations of structure formation in different warm dark matter scenarios. We find that the size of the core we obtain in simulated haloes is in good agreement with theoretical expectations based on Liouville’s theorem. However, our simulations show that in order to create a significant core, (rc � 1 kpc), in a dwarf galaxy (M � 10 10 M⊙), a thermal candidate with a mass as low as 0.1 keV is required. This would fully prevent the formation of the dwarf galaxy in the first place. For candidates satisfying large scale structure constrains (m� larger than � 1 2 keV) the expected size of the core is of the order of 40 (80) pc for a dark matter halo with a mass of 10 10 (10 8 ) M⊙. We conclude that “standard” warm dark matter is not viable solution for explaining the presence of cored density profiles in low mass galaxies.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/80db5a055ceea771301db1908315504c41b31b6e

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Citations in the corpus

The unexpected diversity of dwarf galaxy rotation curves (2015, background): “7 We note that Macciò et al. (2012b) report the creation of cores in more massive systems, but since these authors do not show the circular velocity profiles, we have been unable to add their results to our plot.”
The Dark Matter Crisis: Falsification of the Current Standard Model of Cosmology (2012, methodology): “WDM models tuned to account for the observed large cores in dwarf galaxies have such long DM particle streaming lengths that the dwarf galaxies cannot form in the first place (Macciò et al. 2012).”
Small scale problems of the $\Lambda$CDM model: a short review (2016, background): “The vertical line represents the upper limit WDM mass, constrained from large scale observations (reproduced from [339]).”
A model for halo formation with axion mixed dark matter (2013, background): “WDM (Lovell et al. 2012) and C+WDM (Maccio’ et al. 2012b; Medvedev 2013) are also known to help this problem, since the flattened variance leads to later formation times and lower concentration for these most massive subhaloes.”
Cosmological Simulations with Self-Interacting Dark Matter I: Constant Density Cores and Substructure (2012, unknown): “Otherwise, the abundance and structure of halos and subhalos isnearly indistinguishable from CDM (Villaescusa-Navarro & Dalal 2011; Maccio’ et al. 2012).”
Axion dark matter, solitons and the cusp–core problem (2015, methodology): “However, mass ranges allowed by large-scale structure constraints, mW O(fewkeV) limit core sizes to be too small (e.g. Macciò et al. 2012; Schneider et al. 2014).”
Understanding the shape and diversity of dwarf galaxy rotation curves in ΛCDM (2016, background): “…& Steinhardt 2000; Alcubierre et al. 2002; Zavala et al. 2013; Elbert et al. 2014; Magaña & Matos 2012), or weakly relativistic warm dark matter (e.g. Bode et al. 2001; AvilaReese et al. 2001; Strigari et al. 2007; Boyarsky et al. 2009; Villaescusa-Navarro & Dalal 2011; Macciò et al. 2012).”
Cusp-core transformations in dwarf galaxies: observational predictions (2012, methodology): “…have been proposed in the recent years – for example a warm dark matter particle (Kuzio de Naray et al. 2010; Villaescusa-Navarro & Dalal 2011; Macciò et al. 2012) or self-interacting dark matter (Spergel & Steinhardt 2000; Rocha et al. 2012) – but the only explanation consistent with CDM…”
A White Paper on keV sterile neutrino Dark Matter (2016, background): “This could be in better agreement with observations [335, 337, 473], as shown in Fig.”
Constraining the mass of light bosonic dark matter using SDSS Lyman-α forest (2017, background): “This is the ”Catch 22” problem (Macciò et al. 2012) : for WDM with a mass of a few keV, the halo core size, which originates from the abovementioned Tremaine-Gunn phase-space density argument, is too small to solve the apparent cusp-core issue.”
Numerical simulations of the dark universe: State of the art and the next decade (2012, methodology): “For realistic models that are consistent with constraints from the Lyman-α forest, however, it can be shown [290, 291] that phase-space density limited cores only occur on very small scales, rcore/Rvir .”
The properties of warm dark matter haloes (2013, background): “However, recent analytical and numerical work (Macciò et al. 2012; Shao et al. 2013; Macciò et al. 2013) has shown that the resulting cores are astrophysically uninteresting being, in particular, significantly smaller than the cores claimed to be present in dwarf satellites of the Milky Way (e.g.…”
THE DENSITY PROFILES OF MASSIVE, RELAXED GALAXY CLUSTERS. II. SEPARATING LUMINOUS AND DARK MATTER IN CLUSTER CORES (2012, background): “These include warm sterile neutrinos at the ∼ keV scale (e.g., Abazajian et al. 2001; Boyarsky et al. 2009; Macciò et al. 2012; Menci et al. 2012), “fuzzy” CDM composed from an ultralight scalar particle (Hu et al. 2000; Woo & Chiueh 2009), dark matter produced from early decays (Kaplinghat 2005),…”
WHY BARYONS MATTER: THE KINEMATICS OF DWARF SPHEROIDAL SATELLITES (2012, background): “The bursty SFHs in the most massive halos lead to DM core creation prior to infall (see also Read & Gilmore 2005; Macciò et al. 2012b; Pontzen & Governato 2012; Teyssier et al. 2012b; Peñarrubia et al. 2012; Garrison-Kimmel et al. 2013).1 Many subhalos lose most of their gas after infall and are…”
A fundamental problem in our understanding of low-mass galaxy evolution (2012, methodology): “Simulations are based on a WMAP5 cosmology, with the power spectrum truncated as suggested by Viel et al. (2005), using the analytical expression in Macciò et al. (2012).”