Cluster Mass Halos Research Articles

Dark matter in Draco and the Local Group: Implications for direct detection experiments

We use a cosmological simulation of the Local Group to make quantitative and speculative predictions for direct detection experiments. Cold dark matter (CDM) halos form via a complex series of mergers, accretion events and violent relaxation which precludes the formation of significant caustic features predicted by axially symmetric collapse. The halo density profiles are combined with observational constraints on the galactic mass distribution to constrain the local density of cold dark matter to lie in the range 0.18 <~ rho_CDM(R_solar)/GeV cm^-3 <~ 0.30. In velocity space, coherent streams of dark matter from tidally disrupted halos fill the halo and provide a tracer of the merging hierarchy. The particle velocities within triaxial CDM halos cannot be approximated by a simple Maxwellian distribution and is radially biased at the solar position. The detailed phase space structure within the solar system will depend on the early merger history of the progenitor halos and the importance of major mergers over accretion dominated growth. We follow the formation of a ``Draco'' sized dSph halo of mass 10^8M_solar with several million particles and high force accuracy. Its internal structure and substructure resembles that of galactic or cluster mass halos: the density profile has a singular central cusp and it contains thousands of sub-halos orbiting within its virial radius demonstrating a self-similar nature to collisionless dark matter sub-clustering. The singular cores of substructure halos always survive complete tidal disruption although mass loss is continuous and rapid. Extrapolating wildly to earth mass halos with velocity dispersion of 1 m s^-1 (roughly equal to the free streaming scale for neutralinos) we find that most of the dark matter may remain attached to bound subhalos. (Abridged)

The Density Profiles of the Dark Matter Halo Are Not Universal.

We perform a series of high-resolution N-body simulations designed to examine the density profiles of dark matter halos. From 12 simulated halos ranging in mass from 2x1012 to 5x1014 h-1 M middle dot in circle (represented by approximately 1 million particles within the virial radius), we find a clear systematic correlation between the halo mass and the slope of the density profile at 1% of the virial radius, in addition to the variations of the slope among halos of similar mass. More specifically, the slope is approximately -1.5, -1.3, and -1.1 for galaxy-, group-, and cluster-mass halos, respectively. While we confirm the earlier simulation results that the inner slope is steeper than the universal profile originally proposed by Navarro, Frenk, & White, this mass dependence is inconsistent with several analytical arguments attempting to link the inner slope with the primordial index of the fluctuation spectrum. Thus, we conclude that the dark matter density profiles, especially in the inner region, are not universal.

Dark Matter Substructure within Galactic Halos

We use numerical simulations to examine the substructure within galactic and cluster mass halos that form within a hierarchical universe. Clusters are easily reproduced with a steep mass spectrum of thousands of substructure clumps that closely matches observations. However, the survival of dark matter substructure also occurs on galactic scales, leading to the remarkable result that galaxy halos appear as scaled versions of galaxy clusters. The model predicts that the virialised extent of the Milky Way's halo should contain about 500 satellites with circular velocities larger than Draco and Ursa-Minor i.e. bound masses > 10^8Mo and tidally limited sizes > kpc. The substructure clumps are on orbits that take a large fraction of them through the stellar disk leading to significant resonant and impulsive heating. Their abundance and singular density profiles has important implications for the existence of old thin disks, cold stellar streams, gravitational lensing and indirect/direct detection experiments.

Structure Formation with Cold plus Hot Dark Matter

We report results from high-resolution particle-mesh (PM) N-body simulations of structure formation in an $\Omega=1$ cosmological model with a mixture of Cold plus Hot Dark Matter (C+HDM) having $\Omega_{\rm cold}=0.6$, $\Omega_\nu=0.3$, and $\Omega_{\rm baryon}=0.1$. We present analytic fits to the C+HDM power spectra for both cold and hot ($\nu$) components, which provide initial conditions for our nonlinear simulations. In order to sample the neutrino velocities adequately, these simulations included six times as many neutrino particles as cold particles. Our simulation boxes were 14, 50, and 200~Mpc cubes (with $H_0=50$ km s$^{-1}$ Mpc$^{-1}$); we also did comparison simulations for Cold Dark Matter (CDM) in a 50~Mpc box. C+HDM with linear bias factor $b=1.5$ is consistent both with the COBE data and with the galaxy correlations we calculate. We find the number of halos as a function of mass and redshift in our simulations; our results for both CDM and C+HDM are well fit by a Press-Schechter model. The number density of galaxy-mass halos is smaller than for CDM, especially at redshift $z>2$, but the numbers of cluster-mass halos are comparable. We also find that on galaxy scales the neutrino velocities and flatter power spectrum in C+HDM result in galaxy pairwise velocities that are in good agreement with the data, and about 30\% smaller than in CDM with the same biasing factor. On scales of several tens of Mpc, the C+HDM streaming velocities are considerably larger than CDM. Thus C+HDM looks promising as a model of structure formation.