Density Profiles of CDM Microhalos and their Implications for Annihilation Boost Factors

TL;DR

This study uses high-resolution simulations to analyze the density profiles of Earth-mass CDM microhalos, revealing steeper inner profiles with a cutoff in the power spectrum, which impacts dark matter annihilation boost factors.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed simulation-based analysis of microhalo density profiles considering a cutoff in the power spectrum, showing steeper inner profiles and realistic boost factors.

Findings

Microhalos follow NFW profiles without cutoff

Cutoff leads to steeper inner density profiles (~r^{-1.4})

Boost factors for Milky Way halos increase modestly from 3.5 to 4

Abstract

In a standard cold dark matter (CDM) cosmology, microhalos at the CDM cutoff scale are the first and smallest objects expected to form in the universe. Here we present results of high resolution simulations of three representative roughly Earth-mass microhalos in order to determine their inner density profile. We find that CDM microhalos in simulations without a cutoff in the power spectrum roughly follow the NFW density profile, just like the much larger CDM halos on galaxy and galaxy cluster scales. But having a cutoff in the initial power spectrum at a typical neutralino free streaming scale of $10^{-7} M_{\odot}$ makes their inner density profiles considerably steeper, i.e. $\rho \propto r^{-(1.3-1.4)}$, in good agreement with the results from Ishiyama et al. (2010). An extrapolation of the halo and subhalo mass functions down to the cutoff scale indicates that microhalos are extremely abundant throughout the present day dark matter distribution and might contribute significantly to indirect dark matter detection signals. Assuming a transition from a NFW to a steeper inner profile ($\rho \propto r^{-1.4}$) two orders of magnitude above the cutoff scale, the total boost factor for a Milky Way sized dark matter halo increases from about 3.5 to 4. We further find that CDM microhalo concentrations are consistent with the Bullock et al. (2001) model and clearly rule out simplistic power law models for the mass dependence of concentrations and subhalo annihilation, which would erroneously lead to very large boost factors (a few hundred for galaxy halos and over 1000 for clusters).