Probing non-thermal light DM with structure formation and $N_\mathrm{eff}$

TL;DR

This paper investigates how non-thermal dark matter distributions affect structure formation and $N_ ext{eff}$ constraints, providing a method to evaluate the viability of such models against observational data.

Contribution

It introduces a simple parametrization for non-thermal DM distributions and a fitting procedure to assess their impact on structure formation and $N_ ext{eff}$ constraints.

Findings

Derived suppression of small-scale structures for non-thermal DM scenarios.

Established bounds on non-thermal DM parameters using structure formation data.

Provided a versatile fitting method for various non-thermal DM models.

Abstract

In many models of dark matter (DM), several production mechanisms contribute to its final abundance, often leading to a non-thermal momentum distribution. This makes it more difficult to assess whether such a model is consistent with structure formation observations. We simulate the matter power spectrum for DM scenarios characterized by at least two temperatures and derive the suppression of structures at small scales and the expected number of Milky Way dwarf galaxies from it. This, together with the known bound on the number of relativistic particle species, $N_\mathrm{eff}$, allows us to obtain constraints on the parameter space of non-thermally produced DM. We propose a simple parametrization for non-thermal DM distributions and present a fitting procedure that can be used to adapt our results to other models.