No Arabic abstract
The recent detection of a 3.5 keV X-ray line from the centres of galaxies and clusters by Bulbul et al. (2014a) and Boyarsky et al. (2014a) has been interpreted as emission from the decay of 7 keV sterile neutrinos which could make up the (warm) dark matter (WDM). As part of the COpernicus COmplexio (COCO) programme, we investigate the properties of dark matter haloes formed in a high-resolution cosmological $N$-body simulation from initial conditions similar to those expected in a universe in which the dark matter consists of 7 keV sterile neutrinos. This simulation and its cold dark matter (CDM) counterpart have $sim13.4$bn particles, each of mass $sim 10^5, h^{-1} M_odot$, providing detailed information about halo structure and evolution down to dwarf galaxy mass scales. Non-linear structure formation on small scales ($M_{200}, leq, 2 times 10^9,h^{-1},M_odot$) begins slightly later in COCO-Warm than in COCO-Cold. The halo mass function at the present day in the WDM model begins to drop below its CDM counterpart at a mass $sim 2 times 10^{9},h^{-1},M_odot$ and declines very rapidly towards lower masses so that there are five times fewer haloes of mass $M_{200}= 10^{8},h^{-1},M_odot$ in COCO-Warm than in COCO-Cold. Halo concentrations on dwarf galaxy scales are correspondingly smaller in COCO-Warm, and we provide a simple functional form that describes its evolution with redshift. The shapes of haloes are similar in the two cases, but the smallest haloes in COCO-Warm rotate slightly more slowly than their CDM counterparts.
We use the Copernicus Complexio (COCO) high resolution $N$-body simulations to investigate differences in the properties of small-scale structures in the standard cold dark matter (CDM) model and in a model with a cutoff in the initial power spectrum of density fluctuations consistent with both a thermally produced warm dark matter (WDM) particle or a sterile neutrino with mass 7 keV and leptogenesis parameter $L_6=8.7$. The latter corresponds to the coldest model with this sterile neutrino mass compatible with the identification of the recently detected 3.5 keV X-ray line as resulting from particle decay. CDM and WDM predict very different number densities of subhaloes with mass $leq 10^9,h^{-1},M_odot$ although they predict similar, nearly universal, normalised subhalo radial density distributions. Haloes and subhaloes in both models have cuspy NFW profiles, but WDM subhaloes below the cutoff scale in the power spectrum (corresponding to maximum circular velocities $V_{mathrm{max}}^{z=0} leq50~mathrm{kms}^{-1}$) are less concentrated than their CDM counterparts. We make predictions for observable properties using the GALFORM semi-analytic model of galaxy formation. Both models predict Milky Way satellite luminosity functions consistent with observations, although the WDM model predicts fewer very faint satellites. This model, however, predicts slightly more UV bright galaxies at redshift $z>7$ than CDM, but both are consistent with observations. Gravitational lensing offers the best prospect of distinguishing between the models.
Recent high-resolution N-body CDM simulations indicate that nonsingular three-parameter models such as the Einasto profile perform better than the singular two-parameter models, e.g. the Navarro, Frenk and White, in fitting a wide range of dark matter haloes. While many of the basic properties of the Einasto profile have been discussed in previous studies, a number of analytical properties are still not investigated. In particular, a general analytical formula for the surface density, an important quantity that defines the lensing properties of a dark matter halo, is still lacking to date. To this aim, we used a Mellin integral transform formalism to derive a closed expression for the Einasto surface density and related properties in terms of the Fox H and Meijer G functions, which can be written as series expansions. This enables arbitrary-precision calculations of the surface density and the lensing properties of realistic dark matter halo models. Furthermore, we compared the Sersic and Einasto surface mass densities and found differences between them, which implies that the lensing properties for both profiles differ.
We introduce Copernicus Complexio (COCO), a high-resolution cosmological N-body simulation of structure formation in the $Lambda{rm CDM}{}$ model. COCO follows an approximately spherical region of radius $sim 17.4h^{-1},{rm Mpc}$ embedded in a much larger periodic cube that is followed at lower resolution. The high resolution volume has a particle mass of $1.135times10^5h^{-1}{rm M}_{odot}$ (60 times higher than the Millennium-II simulation). COCO gives the dark matter halo mass function over eight orders of magnitude in halo mass; it forms $sim 60$ haloes of galactic size, each resolved with about 10 million particles. We confirm the power-law character of the subhalo mass function, $bar{N}(>mu)proptomu^{-s}$, down to a reduced subhalo mass $M_{sub}/M_{200}equivmu=10^{-6}$, with a best-fit power-law index, $s=0.94$, for hosts of mass $langle M_{200}rangle=10^{12}h^{-1}{rm M}_{odot}$. The concentration-mass relation of COCO haloes deviates from a single power law for masses $M_{200}<textrm{a few}times 10^{8}h^{-1}{rm M}_{odot}$, where it flattens, in agreement with results by Sanchez-Conde et al. The host mass invariance of the reduced maximum circular velocity function of subhaloes, $ uequiv V_{max}/V_{200}$, hinted at in previous simulations, is clearly demonstrated over five orders of magnitude in host mass. Similarly, we find that the average, normalised radial distribution of subhaloes is approximately universal (i.e. independent of subhalo mass), as previously suggested by the Aquarius simulations of individual haloes. Finally, we find that at fixed physical subhalo size, subhaloes in lower mass hosts typically have lower central densities than those in higher mass hosts.
We present the results of the Cosmogrid cosmological N-body simulation suites based on the concordance LCDM model. The Cosmogrid simulation was performed in a 30Mpc box with 2048^3 particles. The mass of each particle is 1.28x10^5 Msun, which is sufficient to resolve ultra-faint dwarfs. We found that the halo mass function shows good agreement with the Sheth & Tormen fitting function down to ~10^7 Msun. We have analyzed the spherically averaged density profiles of the three most massive halos which are of galaxy group size and contain at least 170 million particles. The slopes of these density profiles become shallower than -1 at the inner most radius. We also find a clear correlation of halo concentration with mass. The mass dependence of the concentration parameter cannot be expressed by a single power law, however a simple model based on the Press-Schechter theory proposed by Navarro et al. gives reasonable agreement with this dependence. The spin parameter does not show a correlation with the halo mass. The probability distribution functions for both concentration and spin are well fitted by the log-normal distribution for halos with the masses larger than ~10^8 Msun. The subhalo abundance depends on the halo mass. Galaxy-sized halos have 50% more subhalos than ~10^{11} Msun halos have.
The development of methods and algorithms to solve the $N$-body problem for classical, collisionless, non-relativistic particles has made it possible to follow the growth and evolution of cosmic dark matter structures over most of the Universes history. In the best studied case $-$ the cold dark matter or CDM model $-$ the dark matter is assumed to consist of elementary particles that had negligible thermal velocities at early times. Progress over the past three decades has led to a nearly complete description of the assembly, structure and spatial distribution of dark matter haloes, and their substructure in this model, over almost the entire mass range of astronomical objects. On scales of galaxies and above, predictions from this standard CDM model have been shown to provide a remarkably good match to a wide variety of astronomical data over a large range of epochs, from the temperature structure of the cosmic background radiation to the large-scale distribution of galaxies. The frontier in this field has shifted to the relatively unexplored subgalactic scales, the domain of the central regions of massive haloes, and that of low-mass haloes and subhaloes, where potentially fundamental questions remain. Answering them may require: (i) the effect of known but uncertain baryonic processes (involving gas and stars), and/or (ii) alternative models with new dark matter physics. Here we present a review of the field, focusing on our current understanding of dark matter structure from $N$-body simulations and on the challenges ahead.