Lyman-$\alpha$ forest and non-linear structure characterization in Fuzzy Dark Matter cosmologies

TL;DR

This paper uses advanced N-body hydrodynamical simulations to study how Fuzzy Dark Matter influences the Lyman-alpha forest and halo properties, providing new constraints on FDM mass and insights into structure formation.

Contribution

It introduces a fully consistent N-body hydrodynamical simulation approach for FDM, enabling detailed analysis of FDM effects on astrophysical observables without approximations.

Findings

FDM impacts Lyman-alpha forest statistics significantly.

FDM alters halo abundance, shape, and density profiles.

Constraints on FDM mass are derived from simulation data.

Abstract

Fuzzy Dark Matter (FDM) represents an alternative and intriguing description of the standard Cold Dark Matter (CDM) fluid, able to explain the lack of direct detection of dark matter particles in the GeV sector and to alleviate small scales tensions in the cosmic large-scale structure formation. Cosmological simulations of FDM models in the literature were performed either with very expensive high-resolution grid-based simulations of individual haloes or through N-body simulations encompassing larger cosmic volumes but resorting on significant approximations in the FDM non-linear dynamics to reduce their computational cost. With the use of the new N-body cosmological hydrodynamical code AX-GADGET, we are now able not only to overcome such numerical problems, but also to combine a fully consistent treatment of FDM dynamics with the presence of gas particles and baryonic physical processes, in order to quantify the FDM impact on specific astrophysical observables. In particular, in this paper we perform and analyse several hydrodynamical simulations in order to constrain the FDM mass by quantifying the impact of FDM on Lyman-$\alpha$ forest observations, as obtained for the first time in the literature in a N-body setup without approximating the FDM dynamics. We also study the statistical properties of haloes, exploiting the large available sample, to extract information on how FDM affects the abundance, the shape, and density profiles of dark matter haloes.