Reviving sub-keV warm dark matter: a UVLF-based analysis

TL;DR

This study constrains warm dark matter particle mass using high-redshift galaxy data, showing that introducing cold-isocurvature fluctuations can relax mass bounds and potentially reconcile light WDM with observations.

Contribution

It provides the first combined analysis of ultraviolet luminosity functions and cosmological data to constrain WDM mass considering CDM isocurvature, revealing degeneracies and new bounds.

Findings

Pure WDM mass > 1.8 keV at 95% CL

With CDM isocurvature, WDM mass > 0.27 keV at 95% CL

Degeneracy between WDM suppression and isocurvature fluctuations

Abstract

Thermal warm dark matter (WDM) particles with $m_{\rm WDM} \leq 1~\mathrm{keV}$ are ruled out at more than $4\sigma$ by multiple observational probes, owing to the strong suppression of small-scale structure induced by early-time free-streaming. Recently, it was highlighted that a small admixture of $\sim1\%$ ($f_{\rm CDM} \sim\!0.01$) cold dark matter (CDM) endowed with a blue-tilted isocurvature spectrum could offset the WDM-induced suppression and relax the WDM mass bound by a factor of $\mathcal{O}(10)$. If viable, this ''warm + cold-isocurvature'' scenario would allow sub-keV WDM particles to constitute nearly the full dark matter abundance while potentially alleviating some small-scale tensions. In this work, we test this mechanism by constraining the WDM mass $m_{\rm WDM}$ while marginalizing over CDM isocurvature parameters. We combine ultraviolet luminosity function measurements from the \textit{Hubble Space Telescope} and \textit{James Webb Space Telescope} over redshift $4 \leq z \leq 11$ with CMB, BAO, and SNe data. For a pure WDM model, our joint analysis yields a lower bound $m_{\rm WDM} > 1.8~\mathrm{keV}$ (95% credible intervals). When CDM isocurvature is introduced at $f_{\rm CDM} = 0.01$, the limit relaxes to $m_{\rm WDM} > 0.27~\mathrm{keV}$ (95% credible intervals), reflecting a shallow degeneracy in which blue-tilted isocurvature fluctuations partially compensate for WDM suppression. These results provide new constraints on thermal WDM in the presence of CDM isocurvature fluctuations and quantify the extent to which such fluctuations can mask the small-scale signatures of light relics.