Warmth Elevating the Depths: Shallower Voids with Warm Dark Matter

Warm dark matter (WDM) has been proposed as an alternative to cold dark matter (CDM), to resolve issues such as the apparent lack of satellites around the Milky Way. Even if WDM is not the answer to observational issues, it is essential to constrain the nature of the dark matter. The effect of WDM on haloes has been extensively studied, but the small-scale initial smoothing in WDM also affects the present-day cosmic web and voids. It suppresses the cosmic sub-web inside voids, and the formation of both void haloes and subvoids. In $N$-body simulations run with different assumed WDM masses, we identify voids with the ZOBOV algorithm, and cosmic-web components with the ORIGAMI algorithm. As dark-matter warmth increases (i.e., particle mass decreases), void density minima grow shallower, while void edges change little. Also, the number of subvoids decreases. The density field in voids is particularly insensitive to baryonic physics, so if void density profiles and minima could be measured observationally, they would offer a valuable probe of the nature of dark matter. Furthermore, filaments and walls become cleaner, as the substructures in between have been smoothed out; this leads to a clear, mid-range peak in the density PDF.

The Dark Matter Contribution to Galactic Diffuse Gamma Ray Emission

Observations of diffuse Galactic gamma ray emission (DGE) by the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) allow a detailed study of cosmic rays and the interstellar medium. However, diffuse emission models of the inner Galaxy underpredict the Fermi-LAT data at energies above a few GeV and hint at possible non-astrophysical sources including dark matter (DM) annihilations or decays. We present a study of the possible emission components from DM using the high-resolution Via Lactea II N-body simulation of a Milky Way-sized DM halo. We generate full-sky maps of DM annihilation and decay signals that include modeling of the adiabatic contraction of the host density profile, Sommerfeld enhanced DM annihilations, $p$-wave annihilations, and decaying DM. We compare our results with the DGE models produced by the Fermi-LAT team over different sky regions, including the Galactic center, high Galactic latitudes, and the Galactic anti-center. This work provides possible templates to fit the observational data that includes the contribution of the subhalo population to DM gamma-ray emission, with the significance depending on the annihilation/decay channels and the Galactic regions being considered.

Sub-barrier fusion of 32S+90,96Zr: semi-classical coupled-channels approach

The fusion excitation functions have been measured with rather good accuracy for 32S+90Zr and 32S+96Zr near and below the Coulomb barrier. The sub-barrier cross sections for 32S+96Zr are much larger compared with 32S+90Zr. Semi-classical coupled-channels calculations including two-phonon excitations are capable to describe sub-barrier enhancement only for 32S+90Zr. The remaining disagreement for 32S+96Zr comes from the positive Q-value intermediate neutron transfers in this system. The comparison with 40Ca+96Zr suggests that couplings to the positive Q-value neutron transfer channels may play a role in the sub-barrier fusion enhancement. A rather simple model calculation taking neutron transfers into account is proposed to overcome the discrepancies of 32S+96Zr.