Related papers: Soliton Formation and the Core-Halo Mass Relation:…
In this thesis, we investigate the possibility that dark matter consists of ultra light spin-zero particles with mass $m \sim 10^{-22}\ \text{eV}$. We focus on the role of self-interactions, assuming all other non-gravitational couplings to…
A significant fraction of mass in the universe is believed to be in the form of dark matter (DM). Due to gravitational instability, the DM collapses hierarchically into DM halos. In this contribution we present a study of the formation and…
We measure the mass function of dark matter halos in a large set of collisionless cosmological simulations of flat LCDM cosmology and investigate its evolution at z<~2. Halos are identified as isolated density peaks, and their masses are…
Surprisingly compact substructures in galaxies and galaxy clusters, but also field halos, have been observed by gravitational lensing. They could be difficult to explain with collisionless dark matter (DM). To explain those objects, recent…
We use galaxy-galaxy lensing to investigate how the dark matter (DM) haloes and stellar content of galaxies with $0.012 \leq z \leq 0.32$ and $10 \leq \log_{10}(M_\star/\mathrm{M}_\odot) \leq 12$ change as a result of the merger process. To…
In the CDM cosmological framework structures grow from merging with smaller structures. Merging should have observable effects on galaxies including destroying disks and creating spheroids. This proceeding aims to give a brief overview of…
Dark matter halos can enter a phase of gravothermal core--collapse in the presence of self-interactions. This phase that follows a core--expansion phase is thought to be subdominant due to the long time-scales involved. However, it has been…
The inability of standard non-interacting cold dark matter (CDM) to account for the small scale structure of individual galaxies has led to the suggestion that the dark matter may undergo elastic and/or inelastic scattering. We simulate the…
We have derived the first, fully-cosmological, similarity solutions for CDM halo formation in the presence of nongravitational collisionality, which provides an analytical theory of the effect of the self-interacting dark matter (SIDM)…
It is generally assumed that scalar field dark matter halos would contain solitonic cores -- spherically symmetric ground state configurations -- at their centers. This is especially interesting in the case of ultralight dark matter (ULDM),…
When dark matter has a large cross section for self scattering, halos can undergo a process known as gravothermal core collapse, where the inner core rapidly increases in density and temperature. To date, several methods have been used to…
If dark matter interacts, even weakly, via non-gravitational forces, simulations predict that it will be preferentially scattered towards the trailing edge of the halo during collisions between galaxy clusters. This will temporarily create…
It is well known that Ultra-Light Dark Matter (ULDM), usually scalar fields of mass $m \sim 10^{-22}~{\rm eV}$, can solve some of the outstanding problems of the Cold Dark Matter (CDM) paradigm. Such a scalar field could have non-negligible…
We use N-body simulations to investigate the structure of dark halos in the standard Cold Dark Matter cosmogony. Halos are excised from simulations of cosmologically representative regions and are resimulated individually at high…
We develop a hybrid galaxy formation model which uses outputs from an N-body simulation to follow the merger histories (or ``merger trees'') of dark matter halos and treats baryonic processes, such as the cooling of gas within halos and…
We explore how dynamical friction in an ultralight dark matter (ULDM) background is affected by dark matter self-interactions. We calculate the force of dynamical friction on a point mass moving through a uniform ULDM background with…
High resolution cosmological N-body simulations show that the density profiles of dark matter halos in hierarchical cosmogonies are universal, with low mass halos typically denser than more massive ones. This mass-density correlation is…
As-yet undiscovered light bosons may constitute all or part of the dark matter (DM) of our Universe, and are expected to have (weak) self-interactions. We show that the quartic self-interactions generically induce the capture of dark matter…
Fuzzy dark matter (FDM) or wave dark matter is an alternative theory designed to solve the small-scale problems faced by the standard cold dark matter proposal for the primary material component of the universe. It is made up of ultra-light…
We use simulations of merging galaxies to explore the sensitivity of the morphology of tidal tails to variations of the halo mass distributions in the parent galaxies. Our goal is to constrain the mass of dark halos in well-known merging…