Numerical simulations of the dark universe: State of the art and the next decade

By Michael Kuhlen, M. Vogelsberger, R. Angulo. 2012

174 citations recorded by the source corpus.

ABSTRACT We present a review of the current state of the art of cosmological dark matter simulations, with particular emphasis on the implications for dark matter detection efforts and studies of dark energy. This review is intended both for particle physicists, who may find the cosmological simulation literature opaque or confusing, and for astro-physicists, who may not be familiar with the role of simulations for observational and experimental probes of dark matter and dark energy. Our work is complementary to the contribution by Baldi in this issue, which focuses on the treatment of dark energy and cosmic acceleration in dedicated N-body simulations. Truly massive dark matter-only simulations are being conducted on national supercomputing centers, employing from several billion to over half a trillion particles to simulate the formation and evolution of cosmologically representative volumes (cosmic scale) or to zoom in on individual halos (cluster and galactic scale). These simulations cost millions of core-hours, require tens to hundreds of terabytes of memory, and use up to petabytes of disk storage. Predictions from such simulations touch on almost every aspect of dark matter and dark energy studies, and we give a comprehensive overview of this connection. We also discuss the limitations of the cold and collisionless DM-only approach, and describe in some detail efforts to include different particle physics as well as baryonic physics in cosmological galaxy formation simulations, including a discussion of recent results highlighting how the distribution of dark matter in halos may be altered. We end with an outlook for the next decade, presenting our view of how the field can be expected to progress.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e993192baa057284d94519e59e32ce89e75f38ce

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Citations in the corpus

The dependence of dark matter profiles on the stellar-to-halo mass ratio: a prediction for cusps versus cores (2013, background): “…theory, galaxies are embedded within dark matter (DM) haloes (White & Rees c© 2010 RAS 1978; Blumenthal et al. 1984), whose properties have been extensively studied in the past thanks to numerical N-body simulations (e.g. Springel 2005; Power & Knebe 2006; Macciò et al. 2008; Kuhlen et al. 2012).”
A review of indirect searches for particle dark matter (2016, background): “The status of numerical simulations of structure formation including implications for indirect detection is reviewed in [55].”
The mass–concentration–redshift relation of cold dark matter haloes (2013, background): “For n(msub) ∝ m −1.9 sub (Springel et al. 2008) andM0 ∼ 10 12M⊙, we find that a simple extrapolation of the power-law c(M) proposed by Neto et al. results in a boost factor that exceeds by a factor of ∼ 20 that predicted by our model (see also Kuhlen et al. 2012).”
The local dark matter density (2014, methodology): “These structures are a super-position of many tidal streams that intersect the Solar neighbourhood volume; they are particularly important for direct detection experiments that are sensitive to light or inelastic dark matter, or those with directional sensitivity (Kuhlen et al., 2012a).”
Gamma Ray Signals from Dark Matter: Concepts, Status and Prospects (2012, methodology): “tsuﬃciently constrain the DM proﬁle, so one has to rely on (extrapolated) results from num erical N-body simulations of dissipationless structure formation in a ΛCDM cosmology [77, 78]; see also Ref. [79, 80] for a review. Most recent results tend to favor a spherical Einasto proﬁle [81], ρEinasto χ”