The AIDA-TNG project. Abundance, radial distribution, and clustering properties of halos in alternative dark matter models

TL;DR

This study uses cosmological simulations to analyze how alternative dark matter models affect the abundance, distribution, and clustering of halos, revealing distinctive density profiles and clustering patterns that can differentiate these models from cold dark matter.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of halo properties in warm and self-interacting dark matter models using the AIDA-TNG simulations, highlighting the need for a generalized NFW model.

Findings

Warm dark matter halos have cuspier satellite distributions.

Self-interacting dark matter exhibits shallower density profiles.

Small-scale clustering effectively distinguishes dark matter models.

Abstract

Warm and self-interactive dark matter cosmologies have been proposed as nonbaryonic solutions to the tensions between the $\Lambda$ cold dark matter model and observations at the kiloparsec scale. In this paper, we used the dark matter-only runs of the \textsc{aida-tng} project, a set of cosmological simulations of different sizes and resolutions, to analyze the macroscopic impact of alternative dark matter models on the abundance, radial distribution, and clustering properties of halos. We adopted the halo occupation distribution formalism to characterize the evolution of its parameters $M_1$ and $\alpha$ with the mass and redshift selection of our sample. By dividing the halo population into centrals and satellites, we were able to study their spatial density profile. We found that a Navarro-Frenk-White model is not accurate enough to describe the radial distribution of subhalos and that a generalized Navarro-Frenk-White model is required instead. Warm dark matter models, in particular, present a cuspier distribution of satellites, whereas self-interacting dark matter exhibits a shallower density profile. Moreover, we found that the small-scale clustering of dark matter halos provides a powerful tool for distinguishing among alternative dark matter scenarios, in preparation for a more detailed study that fully incorporates baryonic effects and for a comparison with observational data from galaxy clustering.