Disruption of Dark Matter Minihaloes in the Milky Way environment: Implications for Axion Miniclusters and Early Matter Domination

TL;DR

This paper investigates how stellar and tidal disruptions affect the survival of dark matter minihaloes in the Milky Way, providing predictions for their abundance and implications for axion miniclusters and early matter domination.

Contribution

It develops a combined semi-analytic and simulation framework to estimate minihalo survival rates considering environmental effects in the Milky Way.

Findings

Approximately 60% of dense minihaloes survive in the Milky Way environment.

Survival fraction is robust against variations in model parameters.

Predictions inform future dark matter detection efforts.

Abstract

Many theories of dark matter beyond the Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMP) paradigm feature an enhanced matter power spectrum on sub-parsec scales, leading to the formation of dense dark matter minihaloes. Future local observations are promising to search for and constrain such substructures. The survival probability of these dense minihaloes in the Milky Way environment is crucial for interpreting local observations. In this work, we investigate two environmental effects: stellar disruption and (smooth) tidal disruption. These two mechanisms are studied using semi-analytic models and idealized N-body simulations. For stellar disruption, we perform a series of N-body simulations of isolated minihalo-star encounters to test and calibrate analytic models of stellar encounters before applying the model to the realistic Milky Way disk environment. For tidal disruption, we perform N-body simulations to confirm the effectiveness of the analytic treatment. Finally, we propose a framework to combine the hierarchical assembly and infall of minihaloes to the Milky Way with the late-time disruption mechanisms. We make predictions for the mass functions of minihaloes in the Milky Way. The survival fraction of dense dark matter minihaloes, e.g. for axion miniclusters and minihaloes from Early Matter Domination, is $\sim 60\%$ with the relatively low-mass, compact population surviving. The survival fraction is insensitive to the detailed model parameters. We discuss various implications of the framework and future direct detection prospects.