Subhaloes in self-interacting galactic dark matter haloes

By M. Vogelsberger, J. Zavala, Abraham Loeb HarvardCfA, Uw, Pi. 2012

486 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present N-body simulations of a new class of self-interacting dark matter models, which do not violate any astrophysical constraints due to a non-power-law velocity dependence of the transfer cross-section which is motivated by a Yukawa-like new gauge boson interaction. Specifically, we focus on the formation of a Milky-Way-like dark matter halo taken from the Aquarius project and resimulate it for a couple of representative cases in the allowed parameter space of this new model. We find that for these cases, the main halo only develops a small core (∼1 kpc) followed by a density profile identical to that of the standard cold dark matter scenario outside of that radius. Neither the subhalo mass function nor the radial number density of subhaloes is altered in these models but there is a significant change in the inner density structure of subhaloes resulting in the formation of a large density core. As a consequence, the inner circular velocity profiles of the most massive subhaloes differ significantly from the cold dark matter predictions and we demonstrate that they are compatible with the observational data of the brightest Milky Way dwarf spheroidals (dSphs) in such a velocity-dependent self-interacting dark matter scenario. Specifically, and contrary to the cold dark matter case, there are no subhaloes that are more concentrated than what is inferred from the kinematics of the Milky Way dSphs. We conclude that these models offer an interesting alternative to the cold dark matter model that can reduce the recently reported tension between the brightest Milky Way satellites and the dense subhaloes found in cold dark matter simulations.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8ac3e337b3fd1c9220d96db0446c9ddff384e5ca

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Citations in the corpus

BARYONS MATTER: WHY LUMINOUS SATELLITE GALAXIES HAVE REDUCED CENTRAL MASSES (2012, background): “…fully reconcile observations with CDM-based models, and alternative cosmological models (e.g., warm or self-interacting dark matter) have also been proposed to explain observations (Alam et al. 2002; Strigari et al. 2007b; Lovell et al. 2012; Vogelsberger et al. 2012; van den Aarssen et al. 2012).”
Self-Interacting Dark Matter from a Non-Abelian Hidden Sector (2014, background): “[3] M.”
Numerical simulations of the dark universe: State of the art and the next decade (2012, unknown): “density core [303].”
Forged in FIRE: cusps, cores and baryons in low-mass dwarf galaxies (2015, background): “While some authors have taken these discrepancies as motivation to explore non-standard dark matter models (Macciò & Fontanot 2010; Vogelsberger et al. 2012; Rocha et al. 2013; Horiuchi et al. 2014; Governato et al. 2015), others have argued that that it may be possible to naturally resolve them…”
Galactic Searches for Dark Matter (2012, background): “Several groups have shown via N-body simulations that subhalos in this model are also less dense, and it is also more likely for the dSphs to populate the most massive subhalos of the Milky Way (Vogelsberger et al., 2012; Rocha et al., 2012; Peter et al., 2012).”
The impact of baryonic physics on the structure of dark matter haloes: the view from the FIRE cosmological simulations (2015, methodology): “Cosmological simulation of a Milky Way-mass halo with this SIDM showed that realistic cores can be formed in subhalos expected to host dwarf galaxies (Vogelsberger et al. 2012a).”
Core formation in dwarf haloes with self-interacting dark matter: no fine-tuning necessary (2014, methodology): “The potential for significant velocity scaling in the SIDM energy-exchange cross section has motivated Vogelsberger et al. (2012) and Zavala et al. (2013) to explicitly run zoom simulations of Milky Way-size hosts using SIDM with velocity-dependent σ/m values tuned to evade bounds on cluster scales…”
ETHOS - an effective theory of structure formation: dark matter physics as a possible explanation of the small-scale CDM problems (2015, methodology): “Self-scattering of DM particles was implemented into the AREPO code (Springel 2010) following the probabilistic approach described in Vogelsberger et al. (2012), which assumes that scattering is elastic and isotropic.”
Gravitational probes of dark matter physics (2017, methodology): “If the density profiles are modified by physics which is not correctly modeled by the CDM-only simulations, the matching between v1/2 and Mvir changes significantly [224, 221, 261, 285].”