No Arabic abstract
Cosmological perturbations of sufficiently long wavelength admit a fluid dynamic description. We consider modes with wavevectors below a scale $k_m$ for which the dynamics is only mildly non-linear. The leading effect of modes above that scale can be accounted for by effective non-equilibrium viscosity and pressure terms. For mildly non-linear scales, these mainly arise from momentum transport within the ideal and cold but inhomogeneous fluid, while momentum transport due to more microscopic degrees of freedom is suppressed. As a consequence, concrete expressions with no free parameters, except the matching scale $k_m$, can be derived from matching evolution equations to standard cosmological perturbation theory. Two-loop calculations of the matter power spectrum in the viscous theory lead to excellent agreement with $N$-body simulations up to scales $k=0.2 , h/$Mpc. The convergence properties in the ultraviolet are better than for standard perturbation theory and the results are robust with respect to variations of the matching scale.
We use large-scale cosmological observations to place constraints on the dark-matter pressure, sound speed and viscosity, and infer a limit on the mass of warm-dark-matter particles. Measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies constrain the equation of state and sound speed of the dark matter at last scattering at the per mille level. Since the redshifting of collisionless particles universally implies that these quantities scale like $a^{-2}$ absent shell crossing, we infer that today $w_{rm (DM)}< 10^{-10.0}$, $c_{rm s,(DM)}^2 < 10^{-10.7}$ and $c_{rm vis, (DM)}^{2} < 10^{-10.3}$ at the $99%$ confidence level. This very general bound can be translated to model-dependent constraints on dark-matter models: for warm dark matter these constraints imply $m> 70$ eV, assuming it decoupled while relativistic around the same time as the neutrinos; for a cold relic, we show that $m>100$ eV. We separately constrain the properties of the DM fluid on linear scales at late times, and find upper bounds $c_{rm s, (DM)}^2<10^{-5.9}$, $c_{rm vis, (DM)}^{2} < 10^{-5.7}$, with no detection of non-dust properties for the DM.
We revisit the impact of early dark energy (EDE) on galaxy clustering using BOSS galaxy power spectra, analyzed using the effective field theory (EFT) of large-scale structure (LSS), and anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) from Planck. Recent studies found that these data place stringent constraints on the maximum abundance of EDE allowed in the Universe. We argue here that their conclusions are a consequence of their choice of priors on the EDE parameter space, rather than any disagreement between the data and the model. For example, when considering EFT-LSS, CMB, and high-redshift supernovae data we find the EDE and $Lambda$CDM models can provide statistically indistinguishable fits ($Delta chi^2 = 0.12$) with a relatively large value for the maximum fraction of energy density in the EDE ($f_{rm ede} = 0.09$) and Hubble constant ($H_0 = 71$ km/s/Mpc) in the EDE model. Moreover, we demonstrate that the constraining power added from the inclusion of EFT-LSS traces to the potential tension between the power-spectrum amplitudes $A_s$ derived from BOSS and from Planck that arises even within the context of $Lambda$CDM. Until this is better understood, caution should be used when interpreting EFT-BOSS+Planck constraints to models beyond $Lambda$CDM. These findings suggest that EDE still provides a potential resolution to the Hubble tension and that it is worthwhile to test the predictions of EDE with future data-sets and further study its theoretical possibilities.
A scenario for the cosmological evolution of self-interacting Bose-Einstein condensed (SIBEC) dark matter (DM) as the final product of a transition from an initial cold DM (CDM)-like phase is considered, motivated by suggestions in the literature that a cold DM gas might have undergone a Bose-Einstein condensate phase transition. The phenomenological model employed for the cold-SIBEC transition introduces three additional parameters to those already present in $Lambda$CDM; the strength of the DM self-interaction in the SIBEC phase, the time of the transition, and the rate of the transition. Constraints on these extra parameters are obtained from large-scale observables, using the cosmic microwave background (CMB), baryonic acoustic oscillations (BAO) and growth factor measurements, and type Ia supernovae (SNIa) distances. The standard cosmological parameters are found to be unchanged from $Lambda$CDM, and upper bounds on the SIBEC-DM self-interaction for the various transition times and rates are obtained. If, however, SIBEC-DM is responsible for the tendency of low-mass halos to be cored rather than cuspy, then cold-SIBEC transition times around matter-radiation equality and earlier are ruled out.
Tidal gravitational forces can modify the shape of galaxies and clusters of galaxies, thus correlating their orientation with the surrounding matter density field. We study the dependence of this phenomenon, known as intrinsic alignment (IA), on the mass of the dark matter haloes that host these bright structures, analysing the Millennium and Millennium-XXL $N$-body simulations. We closely follow the observational approach, measuring the halo position-halo shape alignment and subsequently dividing out the dependence on halo bias. We derive a theoretical scaling of the IA amplitude with mass in a dark matter universe, and predict a power-law with slope $beta_{mathrm{M}}$ in the range $1/3$ to $1/2$, depending on mass scale. We find that the simulation data agree with each other and with the theoretical prediction remarkably well over three orders of magnitude in mass, with the joint analysis yielding an estimate of $beta_{mathrm{M}} = 0.36^{+0.01}_{-0.01}$. This result does not depend on redshift or on the details of the halo shape measurement. The analysis is repeated on observational data, obtaining a significantly higher value, $beta_{mathrm{M}} = 0.56^{+0.05}_{-0.05}$. There are also small but significant deviations from our simple model in the simulation signals at both the high- and low-mass end. We discuss possible reasons for these discrepancies, and argue that they can be attributed to physical processes not captured in the model or in the dark matter-only simulations.
Cannibals are dark matter particles with a scattering process that allows three particles to annihilate to two. This exothermic process keeps the gas of the remaining particles warm long after they become non-relativistic. A cannibalizing dark sector which is decoupled from the Standard Model naturally arises from a pure-glue confining hidden sector. It has an effective field theory description with a single massive interacting real scalar field, the lightest glueball. Since warm dark matter strongly suppresses growth of structure cannibals cannot be all of the dark matter. Thus we propose a scenario where most dark matter is non-interacting and cold but about 1 percent is cannibalistic. We review the cannibals unusual scaling of the temperature and energy and number densities with redshift and generalize the equations for the growth of matter density perturbations to the case of cannibals. We solve the equations numerically to predict the scaling of the Hubble parameter and the characteristic shape of the linear matter power spectrum as a function of model parameters. Our results may have implications for the $sigma_8$ and $H_0$ problems.