ETHOS - an effective theory of structure formation: dark matter physics as a possible explanation of the small-scale CDM problems

By M. Vogelsberger, J. Zavala, F. Cyr-Racine, C. Pfrommer, T. Bringmann, Kris Sigurdson Mit, D. C. Centre, Harvard, Caltech, Hits and 3 more. 2015

215 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present the first simulations within an effective theory of structure formation (ETHOS), which includes the effect of interactions between dark matter and dark radiation on the linear initial power spectrum and dark matter self-interactions during non-linear structure formation. We simulate a Milky Way-like halo in four different dark matter models and the cold dark matter case. Our highest resolution simulation has a particle mass of 2.8 × 10^4 M_⊙ and a softening length of 72.4 pc. We demonstrate that all alternative models have only a negligible impact on large-scale structure formation. On galactic scales, however, the models significantly affect the structure and abundance of subhaloes due to the combined effects of small-scale primordial damping in the power spectrum and late-time self-interactions. We derive an analytic mapping from the primordial damping scale in the power spectrum to the cutoff scale in the halo mass function and the kinetic decoupling temperature. We demonstrate that certain models within this extended effective framework that can alleviate the too-big-to-fail and missing satellite problems simultaneously, and possibly the core-cusp problem. The primordial power spectrum cutoff of our models naturally creates a diversity in the circular velocity profiles, which is larger than that found for cold dark matter simulations. We show that the parameter space of models can be constrained by contrasting model predictions to astrophysical observations. For example, some models may be challenged by the missing satellite problem if baryonic processes were to be included and even oversolve the too-big-to-fail problem; thus ruling them out.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a3103c7e7529eb0349b67aeba785acea65f827b0

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Citations in the corpus

Gravitational probes of dark matter physics (2017, background): “[439, 405, 440]) should be used in order to minimize the computational overhead for theory predictions.”
Small-Scale Challenges to the ΛCDM Paradigm (2017, background): “Such models produce results that are a hybrid between traditional WDM and SIDM with scale-invariant spectra (e.g. Cyr-Racine et al. 2016; Vogelsberger et al. 2016).”
Mining for Dark Matter Substructure: Inferring Subhalo Population Properties from Strong Lenses with Machine Learning (2019, result): “…DiFranzo 2018) are examples of scenarios that would modify the structure of the subhalo density proﬁles in addition to possibly depressing the abundance of lower-mass halos as compared to CDM predictions in the latter case (Buckley et al. 2014; Schewtschenko et al. 2015; Vogelsberger et al. 2016).”
CMB-S4 Science Case, Reference Design, and Project Plan (2019, background): “Recent progress in this respect is already promising [298].”
“Non-cold” dark matter at small scales: a general approach (2017, methodology): “We thus consider our approach to be easily extendable to basically cover the same range of models as ETHOS does.”