No Arabic abstract
The abundance of dark matter satellites and subhalos, the existence of density cusps at the centers of dark matter halos, and problems producing realistic disk galaxies in simulations are issues that have raised concerns about the viability of the standard cold dark matter (LambdaCDM) scenario for galaxy formation. This article reviews these issues, and considers the implications for cold vs. various varieties of warm dark matter (WDM). The current evidence appears to be consistent with standard LambdaCDM, although improving data may point toward a rather tepid version of LambdaWDM -- tepid since the dark matter cannot be very warm without violating observational constraints.
The abundance of dark matter satellites and subhalos, the existence of density cusps at the centers of dark matter halos, and problems producing realistic disk galaxies in simulations are issues that have raised concerns about the viability of the standard cold dark matter (LambdaCDM) scenario for galaxy formation. This talk reviews these issues, and considers the implications for cold vs. various varieties of warm dark matter (WDM). The current evidence appears to be consistent with standard LambdaCDM, although improving data may point toward a rather tepid version of LambdaWDM - tepid since the dark matter cannot be very warm without violating observational constraints.
The Atacama Cosmology Telescope has measured the angular power spectra of microwave fluctuations to arcminute scales at frequencies of 148 and 218 GHz, from three seasons of data. At small scales the fluctuations in the primordial Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) become increasingly obscured by extragalactic foregounds and secondary CMB signals. We present results from a nine-parameter model describing these secondary effects, including the thermal and kinematic Sunyaev-Zeldovich (tSZ and kSZ) power; the clustered and Poisson-like power from Cosmic Infrared Background (CIB) sources, and their frequency scaling; the tSZ-CIB correlation coefficient; the extragalactic radio source power; and thermal dust emission from Galactic cirrus in two different regions of the sky. In order to extract cosmological parameters, we describe a likelihood function for the ACT data, fitting this model to the multi-frequency spectra in the multipole range 500<ell<10000. We extend the likelihood to include spectra from the South Pole Telescope at frequencies of 95, 150, and 220 GHz. Accounting for different radio source levels and Galactic cirrus emission, the same model provides an excellent fit to both datasets simultaneously, with chi2/dof= 675/697 for ACT, and 96/107 for SPT. We then use the multi-frequency likelihood to estimate the CMB power spectrum from ACT in bandpowers, marginalizing over the secondary parameters. This provides a simplified `CMB-only likelihood in the range 500<ell<3500 for use in cosmological parameter estimation.
Interest rises to exploit the full shape information of the galaxy power spectrum, as well as pushing analyses to smaller non-linear scales. Here I use the halo model to quantify the information content in the tomographic angular power spectrum of galaxies, for future high resolution surveys : Euclid and SKA2. I study how this information varies as a function of the scale cut applied, either with angular cut $ell_{max}$ or physical cut kmax. For this, I use analytical covariances with the most complete census of non-Gaussian terms, which proves critical. I find that the Fisher information on most cosmological and astrophysical parameters follows a striking behaviour. Beyond the perturbative regime we first get decreasing returns : the information keeps rising but the slope slows down until reaching a saturation. The location of this plateau is a bit beyond the reach of current modeling methods : k $sim$ 2 Mpc$^{-1}$ and slightly depends on the parameter and redshift bin considered. I explain the origin of this plateau, which is due to non-linear effects both on the power spectrum, and more importantly on non-Gaussian covariance terms. Then, pushing further on I find that information rises again in the highly non-linear regime. I find that the cosmological information in this small scale miracle can indeed be disentangled from astrophysical information and yield large improvements. Pushing SKA2 analysis from kmax=1 Mpc$^{-1}$ to kmax=10 Mpc$^{-1}$ can improve the error bar on $sigma_8$ by a factor 9 and the error bar on the Dark Energy equation of state $w_0$ by a factor 5. Finally I show that high order statistics beyond the power spectrum should yield further significant improvements in this regime, with the improvements increasing when pushing kmax. Data and notebooks reproducing all plots and results will be made available at url{https://github.com/fabienlacasa/SmallScaleMiracle}
In this paper, we discuss the constraints on the reheating temperature supposing an early post-reheating cosmological phase dominated by one or more simple scalar fields produced from inflaton decay and decoupled from matter and radiation. In addition, we explore the combined effects of the reheating and non-standard scalar field phases on the inflationary number of $e$-foldings.
The first objects to arise in a cold dark matter universe present a daunting challenge for models of structure formation. In the ultra small-scale limit, CDM structures form nearly simultaneously across a wide range of scales. Hierarchical clustering no longer provides a guiding principle for theoretical analyses and the computation time required to carry out credible simulations becomes prohibitively high. To gain insight into this problem, we perform high-resolution (N=720^3 - 1584^3) simulations of an Einstein-de Sitter cosmology where the initial power spectrum is P(k) propto k^n, with -2.5 < n < -1. Self-similar scaling is established for n=-1 and n=-2 more convincingly than in previous, lower-resolution simulations and for the first time, self-similar scaling is established for an n=-2.25 simulation. However, finite box-size effects induce departures from self-similar scaling in our n=-2.5 simulation. We compare our results with the predictions for the power spectrum from (one-loop) perturbation theory and demonstrate that the renormalization group approach suggested by McDonald improves perturbation theorys ability to predict the power spectrum in the quasilinear regime. In the nonlinear regime, our power spectra differ significantly from the widely used fitting formulae of Peacock & Dodds and Smith et al. and a new fitting formula is presented. Implications of our results for the stable clustering hypothesis vs. halo model debate are discussed. Our power spectra are inconsistent with predictions of the stable clustering hypothesis in the high-k limit and lend credence to the halo model. Nevertheless, the fitting formula advocated in this paper is purely empirical and not derived from a specific formulation of the halo model.