Effect of supersonic relative motion between baryons and dark matter on collapsed objects

TL;DR

This paper studies how the supersonic relative velocity between baryons and dark matter affects small-scale structure formation, showing it delays halo collapse and reduces the abundance of low-mass halos, with implications for early star formation.

Contribution

It introduces a simple spherical collapse model incorporating relative velocity effects, providing new fitting formulas and halo mass function predictions.

Findings

Relative velocity delays dark matter halo collapse times.

Decreases baryon mass fraction in collapsing halos.

Reduces abundance of halos below 10^8 solar masses/h.

Abstract

Great attention is given to the first star formation and the epoch of reionization as main targets of planned large radio interferometries (e.g. Square Kilometre Array). Recently, it is claimed that the supersonic relative velocity between baryons and cold dark matter can suppress the abundance of first stars and impact the cosmological reionization process. Therefore, in order to compare observed results with theoretical predictions it is important to examine the effect of the supersonic relative motion on the small-scale structure formation. In this paper, we investigate this effect on the nonlinear structure formation in the context of the spherical collapse model in order to understand the fundamental physics in a simple configuration. We show the evolution of the dark matter sphere with the relative velocity by both using N-body simulations and numerically calculating the equation of motion for the dark matter mass shell. The effects of the relative motion in the spherical collapse model appear as the delay of the collapse time of dark matter halos and the decrease of the baryon mass fraction within the dark matter sphere. Based on these results, we provide the fitting formula of the critical density contrast for collapses with the relative motion effect and calculate the mass function of dark matter halos in the Press-Schechter formalism. As a result, the relative velocity decreases the abundance of dark matter halos whose mass is smaller than $10^8~M_\odot/h$.