Structure of Dark Matter Halos in Warm Dark Matter models and in models with Long-Lived Charged Massive Particles

TL;DR

This study compares the formation of non-linear structures in Warm Dark Matter and Long-Lived Charged Massive Particle models, showing that their non-linear clustering properties can be characterized by a common cut-off scale.

Contribution

It demonstrates that different dark matter models with similar cut-off scales produce comparable non-linear structure formation, linking linear power spectra to non-linear clustering.

Findings

Models with similar cut-off scales have comparable halo and subhalo distributions.

The radial distribution of subhalos matches observations for certain cut-off scales.

The cut-off scale predicts non-linear clustering properties across models.

Abstract

We study the formation of non-linear structures in Warm Dark Matter (WDM) models and in a Long-Lived Charged Massive Particle (CHAMP) model. CHAMPs with a decay lifetime of about 1 yr induce characteristic suppression in the matter power spectrum at subgalactic scales through acoustic oscillations in the thermal background. We explore structure formation in such a model. We also study three WDM models, where the dark matter particles are produced through the following mechanisms: i) WDM particles are produced in the thermal background and then kinematically decoupled; ii) WDM particles are fermions produced by the decay of thermal heavy bosons; and iii) WDM particles are produced by the decay of non-relativistic heavy particles. We show that the linear matter power spectra for the three models are all characterised by the comoving Jeans scale at the matter-radiation equality. Furthermore, we can also describe the linear matter power spectrum for the Long-Lived CHAMP model in terms of a suitably defined characteristic cut-off scale k_{Ch}, similarly to the WDM models. We perform large cosmological N-body simulations to study the non-linear growth of structures in these four models. We compare the halo mass functions, the subhalo mass functions, and the radial distributions of subhalos in simulated Milky Way-size halos. We study the models with k_{cut}=51, 410, 820 h/Mpc, and confirm that these statistics are indeed similar between the different WDM models and the Long-Lived CHAMP model. The result suggests that the cut-off scale k_{cut} not only characterises the linear power spectra but also can be used to predict the non-linear clustering properties. The radial distribution of subhalos in Milky Way-size halos is consistent with the observed distribution for k_{cut}~50-800 h/Mpc; such models resolve the so-called "missing satellite problem".