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Register a new userConstraining Ultra-light Axions with Galaxy Cluster Number Counts
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In this paper we investigate the potential of current and upcoming cosmological surveys to constrain the mass and abundance of ultra-light axion (ULA) cosmologies with galaxy cluster number counts. ULAs, sometimes also referred to as Fuzzy Dark Matter, are well-motivated in many theories beyond the Standard Model and could potentially solve the $Lambda$CDM small-scale crisis. Galaxy cluster counts provide a robust probe of the formation of structures in the Universe. Their distribution in mass and redshift is strongly sensitive to the underlying linear matter perturbations. In this forecast paper we explore two scenarios, firstly an exclusion limit on axion mass given a no-axion model and secondly constraints on an axion model. With this we obtain lower limits on the ULA mass on the order of $m_a gtrsim 10^{-24}$ eV. However, this result depends heavily on the mass of the smallest reliably observable clusters for a given survey. Cluster counts, like many other cosmological probes, display an approximate degeneracy in the ULA mass vs. abundance parameter space, which is dependent on the characteristics of the probe. These degeneracies are different for other cosmological probes. Hence galaxy cluster counts might provide a complementary window on the properties of ultra-light axions.
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Sunyaev-Zeldovich (SZ) surveys are promising probes of cosmology - in particular for Dark Energy (DE) -, given their ability to find distant clusters and provide estimates for their mass. However, current SZ catalogs contain tens to hundreds of objects and maximum likelihood estimators may present biases for such sample sizes. In this work we use the Monte Carlo approach to determine the presence of bias on cosmological parameter estimators from cluster abundance as a function of the area and depth of the survey, and the number of cosmological parameters fitted. Assuming perfect knowledge of mass and redshift some estimators have non-negligible biases. For example, the bias of $sigma_8$ corresponds to about $40%$ of its statistical error bar when fitted together with $Omega_c$ and $w_0$. Including a SZ mass-observable relation decreases the relevance of the bias, for the typical sizes of current surveys. The biases become negligible when combining the SZ data with other cosmological probes. However, we show that the biases from SZ estimators do not go away with increasing sample sizes and they may become the dominant source of error for an all sky survey at the South Pole Telescope (SPT) sensitivity. The results of this work validate the use of the current maximum likelihood methods for present SZ surveys, but highlight the need for further studies for upcoming experiments. [abridged]
The axion is a hypothetical, well-motivated dark-matter particle whose existence would explain the lack of charge-parity violation in the strong interaction. In addition to this original motivation, an `axiverse of ultra-light axions (ULAs) with masses $10^{-33},{rm eV}lesssim m_{rm a}lesssim 10^{-10},{rm eV}$ also emerges from string theory. Depending on the mass, such a ULA contributes to the dark-matter density, or alternatively, behaves like dark energy. At these masses, ULAs classical wave-like properties are astronomically manifested, potentially mitigating observational tensions within the $Lambda$CDM paradigm on local-group scales. ULAs also provide signatures on small scales such as suppression of structure, interference patterns and solitons to distinguish them from heavier dark matter candidates. Through their gravitational imprint, ULAs in the presently allowed parameter space furnish a host of observational tests to target in the next decade, altering standard predictions for microwave background anisotropies, galaxy clustering, Lyman-$alpha$ absorption by neutral hydrogen along quasar sightlines, pulsar timing, and the black-hole mass spectrum.
Measurements of cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies provide strong evidence for the existence of dark matter and dark energy. They can also test its composition, probing the energy density and particle mass of different dark-matter and dark-energy components. CMB data have already shown that ultra-light axions (ULAs) with mass in the range $10^{-32}~{rm eV} to 10^{-26}~{rm eV}$ compose a fraction $< 0.01$ of the cosmological critical density. Here, the sensitivity of a proposed CMB-Stage IV (CMB-S4) experiment (assuming a 1 arcmin beam and $< 1~mu K{rm-arcmin}$ noise levels over a sky fraction of 0.4) to the density of ULAs and other dark-sector components is assessed. CMB-S4 data should be $sim 10$ times more sensitive to the ULA energy-density than Planck data alone, across a wide range of ULA masses $10^{-32}< m_{a}< 10^{-23}~{rm eV}$, and will probe axion decay constants of $f_{a}approx 10^{16}~{rm GeV}$, at the grand unified scale. CMB-S4 could improve the CMB lower bound on the ULA mass from $sim 10^{-25}~{rm eV}$ to $10^{-23}~{rm eV}$, nearing the mass range probed by dwarf galaxy abundances and dark-matter halo density profiles. These improvements will allow for a multi-$sigma$ detection of percent-level departures from CDM over a wide range of masses. Much of this improvement is driven by the effects of weak gravitational lensing on the CMB, which breaks degeneracies between ULAs and neutrinos. We also find that the addition of ULA parameters does not significantly degrade the sensitivity of the CMB to neutrino masses. These results were obtained using the axionCAMB code (a modification to the CAMB Boltzmann code), presented here for public use.
The Swift AGN and Cluster Survey (SACS) uses 125 deg^2 of Swift XRT serendipitous fields with variable depths surrounding gamma-ray bursts to provide a medium depth (4e-15 erg/s/cm^2) and area survey filling the gap between deep, narrow Chandra/XMM-Newton surveys and wide, shallow ROSAT surveys. Here we present a catalog of 22,563 point sources and 442 extended sources and examine the number counts of the AGN and galaxy cluster populations. SACS provides excellent constraints on the AGN number counts at the bright end with negligible uncertainties due to cosmic variance, and these constraints are consistent with previous measurements. We use Wise mid-infrared (MIR) colors to classify the sources. For AGN we can roughly separate the point sources into MIR-red and MIR-blue AGN, finding roughly equal numbers of each type in the soft X-ray band (0.5-2 keV), but fewer MIR-blue sources in the hard X-ray band (2-8 keV). The cluster number counts, with 5% uncertainties from cosmic variance, are also consistent with previous surveys but span a much larger continuous flux range. Deep optical or IR follow-up observations of this cluster sample will significantly increase the number of higher redshift (z > 0.5) X-ray-selected clusters.
We use the Milky Ways nuclear star cluster (NSC) to test the existence of a dark matter soliton core, as predicted in ultra-light dark matter (ULDM) models. Since the soliton core size is proportional to mDM^{-1}, while the core density grows as mDM^{2}, the NSC (dominant stellar component within about 3 pc) is sensitive to a specific window in the dark matter particle mass, mDM. We apply a spherical isotropic Jeans model to fit the NSC line-of-sight velocity dispersion data, assuming priors on the Milky Ways supermassive black hole (SMBH) mass taken from the Gravity Collaboration et al. (2020) and stellar density profile taken from Gallego-Cano et al. (2018). We find that the current observational data reject the existence of a soliton core for a single ULDM particle with mass in the range 10^{-20.0} < mDM < 10^{-18.5} eV, assuming that the soliton core structure is not affected by the Milky Ways SMBH. We test our methodology on mock data, confirming that we are sensitive to the same range in ULDM mass as for the real data. Dynamical modelling of a larger region of the Galactic centre, including the nuclear stellar disc, promises tighter constraints over a broader range of mDM. We will consider this in future work.
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