Formation of galaxies and large-scale structure with cold dark matter

Abstract

The dark matter that appears to be gravitationally dominant on all scales larger than galactic cores may consist of axions, stable photinos, or other collisionless particles whose velocity dispersion in the early Universe is so small that fluctuations of galactic size or larger are not damped by free streaming. An attractive feature of this cold dark matter hypothesis is its considerable predictive power: the post-recombination fluctuation spectrum is calculable, and it in turn governs the formation of galaxies and clusters. Good agreement with the data is obtained for a Zeldovich (|δk|2 ∝ k) spectrum of primordial fluctuations.