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Register a new userCosmological Vlasov-Poisson Simulations of Structure Formation with Relic Neutrinos: Nonlinear Clustering and the Neutrino Mass
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We present the results of cosmological simulations of large-scale structure formation with massive neutrinos. The phase-space distribution of the cosmic relic neutrinos is followed, for the first time, by directly integrating the six-dimensional Vlasov-Poisson equations. Our novel approach allows us to represent free streaming and clustering of neutrinos, and their gravitational interaction with cold dark matter accurately. We thus obtain solutions for the collisionless dynamics independent of conventional N-body methods. We perform a suite of hybrid N-body/Vlasov simulations with varying the neutrino mass, and systematically examine the dynamical effects of massive neutrinos on large-scale structure formation. Our simulations show characteristic large-scale clustering of the neutrinos and their coherent streaming motions relative to dark matter. The effective local neutrino temperature around massive galaxy clusters varies by several percent with respect to the cosmic mean; the neutrinos in clusters can be hotter or colder depending on the neutrino mass. We study a number of statistics of the large-scale structure and of dark matter halos in comparison with those obtained by N-body simulations and/or by perturbation theory. Our simulations mark an important milestone in numerical cosmology, and pave a new way to study cosmic structure formation with massive neutrinos.
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We present a new method for simulating cosmologies that contain massive particles with thermal free streaming motion, such as massive neutrinos or warm/hot dark matter. This method combines particle and fluid descriptions of the thermal species to eliminate the shot noise known to plague conventional N-body simulations. We describe this method in detail, along with results for a number of test cases to validate our method, and check its range of applicability. Using this method, we demonstrate that massive neutrinos can produce a significant scale-dependence in the large-scale biasing of deep voids in the matter field. We show that this scale-dependence may be quantitatively understood using an extremely simple spherical expansion model which reproduces the behavior of the void bias for different neutrino parameters.
Light but massive cosmological neutrinos do not cluster significantly on small scales, due to their high thermal velocities. With finite masses, cosmological neutrinos become part of the total matter field and contribute to its smoothing. Structure formation in the presence of massive neutrinos is therefore impeded compared to that in the standard $Lambda$CDM cosmology with massless neutrinos. Neutrinos masses also distort the anisotropy power spectrum of cosmic microwave background (CMB). Furthermore, a finite chemical potential $mu$ for cosmological neutrinos, still allowed by current data, would have a non-negligible impact on CMB and structure formation. We consistently evaluate effects of neutrino masses and chemical potentials on the matter power spectrum by use of a neutrino-involved N-body simulation, with cosmological parameters obtained from a Markov-Chian Moonte-Carlo (MCMC) refitting of CMB data. Our results show that while a finite averaged neutrino mass $m_ u$ tends to suppress the matter power spectrum in a range of wave numbers, the neutrino degeneracy parameters ${xi_i equiv mu_i /T}$ ($i=$1, 2, 3) enhance the latter, leading to a large parameter degeneracy between $m_ u$ and $xi_i$. We provide an empirical formula for the effects on the matter power spectrum in a selected range of wave numbers induced by $m_ u$ and $eta equiv sqrt{sum_i xi^2_i}$. Observing a strong correlation between $m_ u$ and $eta$, we propose a single redshift-independent parameter $m_ u - frac{4}{3}eta^2$ to characterize the neutrino effects on the matter power spectrum.
The standard model of cosmology predicts the existence of cosmic neutrino background in the present Universe. To detect cosmic relic neutrinos in the vicinity of the Earth, it is necessary to evaluate the gravitational clustering effects on relic neutrinos in the Milky Way. Here we introduce a reweighting technique in the N-one-body simulation method, so that a single simulation can yield neutrino density profiles for different neutrino masses and phase space distributions. In light of current experimental results that favor small neutrino masses, the neutrino number density contrast around the Earth is found to be almost proportional to the square of neutrino mass. The density contrast-mass relation and the reweighting technique are useful for studying the phenomenology associated with the future detection of the cosmic neutrino background.
We employ cosmological hydrodynamical simulations to study the growth of massive black holes (BHs) at high redshifts subject to BH merger recoils from gravitational wave emission. We select the most massive dark matter halo at z=6 from the Millennium simulation, and resimulate its formation at much higher resolution including gas physics and a model for BH seeding, growth and feedback. Assuming that the initial BH seeds are relatively massive, of the order of 10^5 Msun, and that seeding occurs around z~15 in dark matter haloes of mass 10^9-10^10 Msun, we find that it is possible to build up supermassive BHs (SMBHs) by z=6 that assemble most of their mass during extended Eddington-limited accretion periods. The properties of the simulated SMBHs are consistent with observations of z=6 quasars in terms of the estimated BH masses and bolometric luminosities, the amount of star formation occurring within the host halo, and the presence of highly enriched gas in the innermost regions of the host galaxy. After a peak in the BH accretion rate at z=6, the most massive BH has become sufficiently massive for the growth to enter into a much slower phase of feedback-regulated accretion. We explore the full range of expected recoils and radiative efficiencies, and also consider models with spinning BHs. In the most `pessimistic case where BH spins are initially high, we find that the growth of the SMBHs can be potentially hampered if they grow mostly in isolation and experience only a small number of mergers. Whereas BH kicks can expel a substantial fraction of low mass BHs, they do not significantly affect the build up of the SMBHs. On the contrary, a large number of BH mergers has beneficial consequences for the growth of the SMBHs by considerably reducing their spin. [Abridged]
We explore the implications of the existence of heavy neutral fermions (i.e., sterile neutrinos) for the thermal history of the early universe. In particular, we consider sterile neutrinos with rest masses in the 100 MeV to 500 MeV range, with couplings to ordinary active neutrinos large enough to guarantee thermal and chemical equilibrium at epochs in the early universe with temperatures T > 1 GeV, but in a range to give decay lifetimes from seconds to minutes. Such neutrinos would decouple early, with relic densities comparable to those of photons, but decay out of equilibrium, with consequent prodigious entropy generation prior to, or during, Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN). Most of the ranges of sterile neutrino rest mass and lifetime considered are at odds with Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) limits on the relativistic particle contribution to energy density (e.g., as parameterized by N_eff). However, some sterile neutrino parameters can lead to an acceptable N_eff. These parameter ranges are accompanied by considerable dilution of the ordinary background relic neutrinos, possibly an adverse effect on BBN, but sometimes fall in a range which can explain measured neutrino masses in some particle physics models. A robust signature of these sterile neutrinos would be a measured N_eff not equal to 3 coupled with no cosmological signal for neutrino rest mass when the detection thresholds for these probes are below laboratory-established neutrino mass values, either as established by the atmospheric neutrino oscillation scale or direct measurements with, e.g., KATRIN or neutrino-less double beta decay experiments.
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