scholarly journals The Lyman-α forest as a diagnostic of the nature of the dark matter

2019 ◽  
Vol 489 (3) ◽  
pp. 3456-3471 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonella Garzilli ◽  
Andrii Magalich ◽  
Tom Theuns ◽  
Carlos S Frenk ◽  
Christoph Weniger ◽  
...  

ABSTRACT The observed Lyman-α flux power spectrum (FPS) is suppressed on scales below ${\sim} ~ 30\, {\rm km\, s}^{-1}$. This cut-off could be due to the high temperature, T0, and pressure, p0, of the absorbing gas or, alternatively, it could reflect the free streaming of dark matter particles in the early universe. We perform a set of very high resolution cosmological hydrodynamic simulations in which we vary T0, p0, and the amplitude of the dark matter free streaming, and compare the FPS of mock spectra to the data. We show that the location of the dark matter free-streaming cut-off scales differently with redshift than the cut-off produced by thermal effects and is more pronounced at higher redshift. We, therefore, focus on a comparison to the observed FPS at z > 5. We demonstrate that the FPS cut-off can be fit assuming cold dark matter, but it can be equally well fit assuming that the dark matter consists of ∼7 keV sterile neutrinos in which case the cut-off is due primarily to the dark matter free streaming.

2021 ◽  
Vol 502 (2) ◽  
pp. 2356-2363
Author(s):  
Antonella Garzilli ◽  
Andrii Magalich ◽  
Oleg Ruchayskiy ◽  
Alexey Boyarsky

ABSTRACT The flux power spectrum (FPS) of the high-resolution Lyman-α forest data exhibits suppression at small scales. The origin of this suppression can be due to long-sought warm dark matter (WDM) or to thermal effects, related to the largely unknown reionization history of the Universe. Previous works explored a specific class of reionization histories that exhibit sufficiently strong thermal suppression and leave little room for WDM interpretation. In this work, we choose a different class of reionization histories, fully compatible with available data on evolution of reionization, but much colder than the reionization histories used by previous authors in determining the nature of dark matter, thus leaving the broadest room for the WDM interpretation of the suppression in the FPS. We find that WDM thermal relics with masses below 1.9 keV (95 per cent CL) would produce a suppression at scales that are larger than observed maximum of the FPS, independently of assumptions about thermal effects. This WDM mass is significantly lower than previously claimed bounds, demonstrating the level of systematic uncertainty of the Lyman-α forest method, due to the previous modelling. We also discuss how this uncertainty may affect also data at large scales measured by eBOSS(Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey).


2020 ◽  
Vol 501 (1) ◽  
pp. L71-L75
Author(s):  
Cornelius Rampf ◽  
Oliver Hahn

ABSTRACT Perturbation theory is an indispensable tool for studying the cosmic large-scale structure, and establishing its limits is therefore of utmost importance. One crucial limitation of perturbation theory is shell-crossing, which is the instance when cold-dark-matter trajectories intersect for the first time. We investigate Lagrangian perturbation theory (LPT) at very high orders in the vicinity of the first shell-crossing for random initial data in a realistic three-dimensional Universe. For this, we have numerically implemented the all-order recursion relations for the matter trajectories, from which the convergence of the LPT series at shell-crossing is established. Convergence studies performed at large orders reveal the nature of the convergence-limiting singularities. These singularities are not the well-known density singularities at shell-crossing but occur at later times when LPT already ceased to provide physically meaningful results.


2021 ◽  
Vol 503 (4) ◽  
pp. 5638-5645
Author(s):  
Gábor Rácz ◽  
István Szapudi ◽  
István Csabai ◽  
László Dobos

ABSTRACT The classical gravitational force on a torus is anisotropic and always lower than Newton’s 1/r2 law. We demonstrate the effects of periodicity in dark matter only N-body simulations of spherical collapse and standard Lambda cold dark matter (ΛCDM) initial conditions. Periodic boundary conditions cause an overall negative and anisotropic bias in cosmological simulations of cosmic structure formation. The lower amplitude of power spectra of small periodic simulations is a consequence of the missing large-scale modes and the equally important smaller periodic forces. The effect is most significant when the largest mildly non-linear scales are comparable to the linear size of the simulation box, as often is the case for high-resolution hydrodynamical simulations. Spherical collapse morphs into a shape similar to an octahedron. The anisotropic growth distorts the large-scale ΛCDM dark matter structures. We introduce the direction-dependent power spectrum invariant under the octahedral group of the simulation volume and show that the results break spherical symmetry.


Universe ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (8) ◽  
pp. 264
Author(s):  
Daniel Boyanovsky

We study various production mechanisms of sterile neutrinos in the early universe beyond and within the standard model. We obtain the quantum kinetic equations for production and the distribution function of sterile-like neutrinos at freeze-out, from which we obtain free streaming lengths, equations of state and coarse grained phase space densities. In a simple extension beyond the standard model, in which neutrinos are Yukawa coupled to a Higgs-like scalar, we derive and solve the quantum kinetic equation for sterile production and analyze the freeze-out conditions and clustering properties of this dark matter constituent. We argue that in the mass basis, standard model processes that produce active neutrinos also yield sterile-like neutrinos, leading to various possible production channels. Hence, the final distribution function of sterile-like neutrinos is a result of the various kinematically allowed production processes in the early universe. As an explicit example, we consider production of light sterile neutrinos from pion decay after the QCD phase transition, obtaining the quantum kinetic equation and the distribution function at freeze-out. A sterile-like neutrino with a mass in the keV range produced by this process is a suitable warm dark matter candidate with a free-streaming length of the order of few kpc consistent with cores in dwarf galaxies.


2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (6) ◽  
pp. 86
Author(s):  
Abdul L. Bhuiyan

<p class="1Body">At the end of the period of contraction of the universe, all objects transform into gravity particles such as photons and electron- positron pairs which exist in virtual state in spacetime at an extremely high temperature. These particles move with extremely high speed comparable to the speed of light. As the early universe starts cooling, the speed of the particles starts to decrease when photons and electron- positron pairs move out of spacetime and appear as real particles. As the temperature continues to fall due to cooling, the electron- positron pairs start forming quarks (u and d) while simultaneously the energy of photons transform into dark matter. The u quarks and d quarks then continue to form nuclei of different elements including radio elements. Simultaneously, the lighter elements such as hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, oxygen, phosphorus, etc. form the precursors to DNAs and RNAs of living organisms.</p>


2019 ◽  
Vol 485 (4) ◽  
pp. 5474-5489 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark R Lovell ◽  
Jesús Zavala ◽  
Mark Vogelsberger

Abstract A cut-off in the linear matter power spectrum at dwarf galaxy scales has been shown to affect the abundance, formation mechanism and age of dwarf haloes, and their galaxies at high and low redshifts. We use hydrodynamical simulations of galaxy formation within the ETHOS framework in a benchmark model that has such a cut-off and that has been shown to be an alternative to the cold dark matter (CDM) model that alleviates its dwarf-scale challenges. We show how galaxies in this model form differently to CDM, on a halo-by-halo basis, at redshifts z ≥ 6. We show that when CDM haloes with masses around the ETHOS half-mode mass scale are resimulated with the ETHOS matter power spectrum, they form with 50 per cent less mass than their CDM counterparts due to their later formation times, yet they retain more of their gas reservoir due to the different behaviour of gas and dark matter during the monolithic collapse of the first haloes in models with a galactic-scale cut-off. As a result, galaxies in ETHOS haloes near the cut-off scale grow rapidly between z = 10 and 6 and by z = 6 end up having very similar stellar masses, higher gas fractions and higher star formation rates relative to their CDM counterparts. We highlight these differences by making predictions for how the number of galaxies with old stellar populations is suppressed in ETHOS for both z = 6 galaxies and for gas-poor Local Group fossil galaxies. Interestingly, we find an age gradient in ETHOS between galaxies that form in high- and low-density environments.


1996 ◽  
Vol 466 ◽  
pp. 13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anatoly Klypin ◽  
Joel Primack ◽  
Jon Holtzman

1993 ◽  
Vol 415 ◽  
pp. L67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tereasa G. Brainerd ◽  
Jens V. Villumsen

1987 ◽  
Vol 117 ◽  
pp. 367-367
Author(s):  
Rosemary F. G. Wyse ◽  
Bernard J. T. Jones

We present a simple model for the formation of elliptical galaxies, based on a binary clustering hierarchy of dark matter, the chemical enrichment of the gas at each level being controlled by supernovae. The initial conditions for the non-linear phases of galaxy formation are set by the post-recombination power spectrum of density fluctuations. We investigate two models for this power spectrum - the first is a straightforward power law, |δk|2 ∝ kn, and the second is Peeble's analytic approximation to the emergent spectrum in a universe dominated by cold dark matter. The normalisation is chosen such that on some scale, say M ∼ 1012M⊙, the objects that condense out have properties - radius and velocity dispersion - resembling ‘typical’ galaxies. There is some ambiguity in this due to the poorly determined mass-to-light ratio of a typical elliptical galaxy — we look at two normalisations, σ1D ∼ 350kms−1 and σ1D ∼ 140kms−1. The choice determines which of Compton cooling or hydrogen cooling is more important during the galaxy formation period. The non-linear behaviour of the perturbations is treated by the homogeneous sphere approximation.


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