Cannibal Dark Matter and Large Scale Structure

TL;DR

This paper explores a novel dark matter model where a small fraction undergoes cannibalistic interactions, affecting cosmic structure formation and potentially addressing the $\sigma_8$ and $H_0$ tensions.

Contribution

It introduces a new scenario with a mixed dark matter composition, including a cannibalistic component, and analyzes its impact on large-scale structure and cosmological parameters.

Findings

Cannibal dark matter suppresses structure growth at small scales.

The model predicts distinctive features in the matter power spectrum.

Potential implications for resolving $\sigma_8$ and $H_0$ discrepancies.

Abstract

Cannibals are dark matter particles with a scattering process that allows three particles to annihilate to two. This exothermic process keeps the gas of the remaining particles warm long after they become non-relativistic. A cannibalizing dark sector which is decoupled from the Standard Model naturally arises from a pure-glue confining hidden sector. It has an effective field theory description with a single massive interacting real scalar field, the lightest glueball. Since warm dark matter strongly suppresses growth of structure cannibals cannot be all of the dark matter. Thus we propose a scenario where most dark matter is non-interacting and cold but about 1 percent is cannibalistic. We review the cannibals' unusual scaling of the temperature and energy and number densities with redshift and generalize the equations for the growth of matter density perturbations to the case of cannibals. We solve the equations numerically to predict the scaling of the Hubble parameter and the characteristic shape of the linear matter power spectrum as a function of model parameters. Our results may have implications for the $\sigma_8$ and $H_0$ problems.