A Robust Measure of Cosmic Structure beyond the Power-Spectrum: Cosmic Filaments and the Temperature of Dark Matter

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new phase-based estimator to detect dark matter particle mass through cosmic filament structures, surpassing traditional correlation methods in scale sensitivity.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel, scale-invariant phase correlation estimator that enhances detection of dark matter particle mass in cosmic structures beyond the power spectrum.

Findings

Phase-correlations reveal dark matter mass more significantly than 2-point correlation.

The new estimator l(r) effectively traces filament-like structures across larger scales.

Simulations demonstrate potential for measuring mDM using phase information.

Abstract

We discover that the mass of dark matter particles mDM is imprinted in phase-correlations of the cosmic density field more significantly than in the 2-point correlation. In particular, phase-correlations trace mDM out to scales about five times larger than the 2-point correlation. This result relies on a new estimator l(r) of pure phase-information in Fourier space, which can be interpreted as a parameter-free and scale-invariant tracer of filament-like structure. Based on simulated density fields we show how mDM can, in principle, be measured using l(r), given a suitably reconstructed density field.