Weakly Self-interacting Dark Matter and the Structure of Dark Halos

By Naoki Yoshida, Volker Springel, Simon D. M. White, G. Tormen. 2000

217 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study the formation of dark halos in a ΛCDM universe under the assumption that cold dark matter (CDM) particles have a finite cross section for elastic collisions. We compare evolution when CDM mean free paths are comparable to halo sizes with the collisionless and fluid limits. We show that a few collisions per particle per Hubble time at halo center can substantially affect the central density profile. Cross sections an order of magnitude larger produce sufficient relaxation for rich clusters to develop core radii in the range 100-200 h-1 kpc. The structural evolution of halos is a competition between collisional relaxation caused by individual particle interactions and violent relaxation resulting from the infall and merging processes by which clusters grow. Although our simulations concentrate on systems of cluster size, we can scale our results to address the halo structure expected for dwarf galaxies. We find that collision cross sections sufficiently large to significantly modify the cores of such galaxies produce cluster cores that are too large and/or too round to be consistent with observation. Thus, the simplest model for self-interacting dark matter is unable to improve fits to published dwarf galaxy rotation curves without violating other observational constraints.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ab37269d9e01b28091fa677f7ca4dc7540e79d3a

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Citations in the corpus

Triaxial Modeling of Halo Density Profiles with High-Resolution N-Body Simulations (2002, background): “…halos is a poorly studied topic, some seminal studies do exist which attempt to detect and characterize the non-spherical signature (e.g., Barnes & Efstathiou 1987; Warren et al. 1992; Dubinski 1994; Jing, et al. 1995; Thomas et al. 1998; Yoshida et al. 2000; Meneghetti et al. 2001; Bullock 2001).”
Weighing simulated galaxy clusters using lensing and X-ray (2009, background): “Thus, they are ideal systems for testing the predictions of the cold-dark-matter paradigm on the internal structure of dark-matter halos (Yoshida et al. 2000; Clowe et al. 2004; Markevitch et al. 2004; Sand et al. 2008).”
Cosmological Parameters from Observations of Galaxy Clusters (2011, background): “In contrast, for dark matter models with significant self-interaction cross sections, halos are expected to exhibit flattened, quasi-isothermal cores (Spergel & Steinhardt 2000; Yoshida et al. 2000).”
Cosmological Simulations with Self-Interacting Dark Matter I: Constant Density Cores and Substructure (2012, methodology): “For example, the cluster (CL 0024+1654) used by Yoshida et al. (2000) to place one of the tightest limits atσ/m = 0.1, is now recognized as an ongoing merger along the line of sight (Czoske et al. 2001, 2002; Zhang et al. 2005; Jee et al. 2007; Jee 2010; Umetsu et al. 2010).”
Constraining self-interacting dark matter with the Milky Way’s dwarf spheroidals (2012, methodology): “It is important to remark that both, Yoshida et al. (2000) and Rocha et al. (2012), extrapolated the regimes they could directly simulate to the regime of dwarfs.”
Constraints on Dark Matter interactions from structure formation: damping lengths (2004, background): “However, according to further investigations (Yoshida et al. 2000; Bautz et al. 2002), this suggestion, at least in its original form, seems not to be the answer.”
Dark Halos: The Flattening of the Density Cusp by Dynamical Friction (2001, background): “These cannot be accounted for in the SIDM scenario (Yoshida et al. 2000).”
Hidden charged dark matter (2009, background): “The strongly self-interacting dark matter proposal motivated the first numerical simulations to deduce the effects of dark matter self-interaction [33, 79, 97–103] and they validated the expectation that during the evolution to isothermality, the dark matter core becomes rounder.”
Mining for Dark Matter Substructure: Inferring Subhalo Population Properties from Strong Lenses with Machine Learning (2019, background): “Dark matter self-interactions (Spergel & Steinhardt 2000; Yoshida et al. 2000; Dav´e et al. 2001; Col´ın et al. 2002; Vogels-berger et al. 2012; Peter et al. 2013; Zavala et al. 2013; Kaplinghat et al. 2014, 2016; Kamada et al. 2017; Elbert et al. 2018; Vogelsberger et al. 2019; Kahlhoefer et al.…”
What does the Bullet Cluster tell us about Self-Interacting Dark Matter? (2016, methodology): “This algorithm is similar to that used in other SIDM simulations (Kochanek & White 2000; Yoshida et al. 2000; Davé et al. 2001; Koda & Shapiro 2011; Vogelsberger, Zavala & Loeb 2012; Fry et al. 2015), with these algorithms differing in the number of neighbours (or search volume) used to find…”
Colliding clusters and dark matter self-interactions (2013, methodology): “Subsequently, various bounds on the self-interaction cross-section have been derived from the study of different astrophysical systems (Yoshida et al. 2000; Dave et al. 2001; Firmani et al. 2001; Gnedin E-mail: felix.kahlhoefer@physics.ox.ac.uk & Ostriker 2001; Hennawi & Ostriker 2002;…”
Halo Properties in Cosmological Simulations of Self-interacting Cold Dark Matter (2000, methodology): “In both cases, there is disagreement over whether SIDM makes halos less or more concentrated than CDM. Moore et al. (2000) and Yoshida et al. (2000a) simulate a galaxy cluster within a cosmological context, using a treecode with SPH to model interactions in the fluid approximation.”
Cosmological simulations with self-interacting dark matter – II. Halo shapes versus observations (2012, background): “Cross sections in this range are also consistent with other density-profile-based and subhalo-based constraints (Yoshida et al. 2000b; Gnedin & Ostriker 2001).”