The flattening of the concentration–mass relation towards low halo masses and its implications for the annihilation signal boost

By M. Sánchez-Conde, F. P. Kipacslac, Stanford, Campus of International Excellence Uamcsic, Madrid, Spain Instituto de Fisica Teorica, U. A. D. Madrid. 2013

201 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In the standard Cold Dark Matter (CDM) theory for understanding the formation of structure in the universe, there exists a tight connection between the properties of dark matter (DM) haloes, and their formation epochs. Such relation can be expressed in terms of a single key parameter, namely the halo concentration. In this work, we examine the median concentration-mass relation, c(M), at present time, over more than 20 orders of magnitude in halo mass, i.e., from tiny Earth-mass microhalos up to galaxy clusters. The c(M) model proposed by Prada et al. (2012), which links the halo concentration with the r.m.s. amplitude of matter linear fluctuations, describes remarkably well all the available N-body simulation data down to ~10^(-6) Msun microhalos. A clear fattening of the halo concentration-mass relation towards smaller masses is observed, that excludes the commonly adopted power-law c(M) models, and stands as a natural prediction for the CDM paradigm. We provide a parametrization for the c(M) relation that works accurately for all halo masses. This feature in the c(M) relation at low masses has decisive consequences e.g. for gamma-ray DM searches, as it implies more modest boosts of the DM annihilation flux due to substructure, i.e., ~35 for galaxy clusters and ~15 for galaxies like our own, as compared to those huge values adopted in the literature that rely on such power-law c(M) extrapolations. We provide a parametrization of the boosts that can be safely used for dwarfs to galaxy cluster-size halos.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8ab62c649446226541e8e249919205654ac8e193

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Citations in the corpus

Mining for Dark Matter Substructure: Inferring Subhalo Population Properties from Strong Lenses with Machine Learning (2019, methodology): “The density pro-ﬁle of subhalos is assumed to be NFW and given by Equation (10), with associated lensing properties as described and the concentration inferred using the model in S´anchez-Conde & Prada (2014).”
Limits on dark matter annihilation signals from the Fermi LAT 4-year measurement of the isotropic gamma-ray background (2015, background): “This range follows from the prescription of [35] using a fixed minimum subhalo mass of Mmin,ss = 10 −6 h−1M but varying the slope of the subhalo mass function (α = 1.”
THE ORIGIN OF THE EXTRAGALACTIC GAMMA-RAY BACKGROUND AND IMPLICATIONS FOR DARK MATTER ANNIHILATION (2015, background): “4 shows the limits for DM annihilating to bb̄ and τ+τ− channels including their uncertainties due to the level of sub-halos in our Galaxy and in all DM halos (Sánchez-Conde & Prada 2014; Ackermann et al. 2014c).”
The accretion history of dark matter haloes - III. A physical model for the concentration-mass relation (2015, unknown): “This impacts calculations of the DM annihilation signal boost (see e.g. Sánchez-Conde & Prada 2014) and the power from DM annihilation (see e.g. Mack 2014), which make extensive use of c–”
Dark matter annihilation and decay in dwarf spheroidal galaxies: the classical and ultrafaint dSphs (2015, methodology): “We have checked for each dSph that the results obtained using the binned or unbinned analysis are consistant. c© Xxxx RAS, MNRAS 000, 1–18 • We assume that the mass-concentration relation5 has a lognormal distribution (Sánchez-Conde & Prada 2014).”
Sensitivity projections for dark matter searches with the Fermi large area telescope (2016, background): “For the description of the subhalos (and consequently of the subhalo boost, b), we follow the recent work [200], which predicts a flattening of the halo concentration parameter for the smallest halo masses, and consequently, moderate b ∼ 30–40 for galaxy clusters.”
A UNIVERSAL MODEL FOR HALO CONCENTRATIONS (2014, background): “Sanchez-Conde & Prada (2014) recently investigated the predictions of the Prada et al. (2012) model for micro-halos, and concluded that the model is in good agreement with simulation results in c–”
A review of indirect searches for particle dark matter (2016, methodology): “In recent years newapproaches have been implemented to calculate the enhancement from substructure, and have somewhat tempered the trend towards very large boosts [174,175].”
Characterization of subhalo structural properties and implications for dark matter annihilation signals (2016, methodology): “1 of Sánchez-Conde & Prada (2014).”