Large scale structure tests of warm dark matter

May, 1995
29 pages
Published in:
  • Astrophys.J. 458 (1996) 1
e-Print:
Report number:
  • FERMILAB-PUB-95-093-A

Citations per year

19962003201020172024051015
Abstract: (arXiv)
Warm dark matter (WDM) is an intriguing model of structure formation from the point of view of both cosmology and particle physics. We consider a one-parameter family of WDM models. The linear power spectra for these models is calculated and compared with the corresponding spectra for cold dark matter (CDM), hot dark matter (HDM) and mixed dark matter (MDM) as well as the power spectrum derived from observations. Our linear analyses suggest that a model universe dominated by a particle whose mass to temperature ratio mx/Txm_x/T_x is increased by a factor of two as compared with the standard HDM neutrino gives a reasonable fit to the data on large (>8h 1Mpc)(>8h~{-1} {\rm Mpc}) scales. NN-body simulations for this particular WDM model show features of both HDM and CDM. As in HDM, the first objects to collapse are large pancake-like structures. The final matter distribution is rather smooth and structures as small as galaxy halos are excluded. However, there appear to be virialized rich clusters evident in the CDM but not the HDM simulations. Unfortunately, a simple comparison of the matter distribution and its statistical properties with observations indicates that WDM, like CDM, has too much power at small scales. This is particularly evident in the small-scale pairwize velocity dispersion. The cluster multiplicity function has the wrong shape with too many rich clusters being produced, though this conclusion is based on the simple assumption that light traces mass in groups of galaxies.
  • cosmological model
  • dark matter
  • temperature
  • neutrino: density
  • neutrino: right-handed
  • galaxy
  • numerical calculations