English

Implications of Milky Way Substructures for the Nature of Dark Matter

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2020-06-05 v3 Astrophysics of Galaxies High Energy Physics - Phenomenology

Abstract

We study how the indirect observation of dark matter substructures in the Milky Way, using recent stellar stream studies, translates into constraints for different dark matter models. Particularly, we use the measured number of dark subhalos in the mass range 107109M10^7-10^9\,{\rm M_{\odot}} to constrain modifications of the subhalo mass function compared to the cold dark matter scenario. We obtain the lower bounds mWDM>3.2keVm_{\rm WDM} > 3.2\,{\rm keV} and mFDM>5.2×1021eVm_{\rm FDM} > 5.2\times 10^{-21}\,{\rm eV} on the warm dark matter and fuzzy dark matter particle mass, respectively. When dark matter is coupled to a dark radiation bath, we find that kinetic decoupling must take place at temperatures higher than Tkd>0.7keVT_{\rm kd} > 0.7\,{\rm keV}. We also discuss future prospects of stellar stream observations.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2001.11013,
  title  = {Implications of Milky Way Substructures for the Nature of Dark Matter},
  author = {María Benito and Juan Carlos Criado and Gert Hütsi and Martti Raidal and Hardi Veermäe},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2001.11013},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

minor errors corrected, accepted for publication in PRD