Dark matter halos of sub-solar mass are the first bound objects to form in cold dark matter theories. In this article, I discuss the present understanding of "microhalos'', their role in structure formation, and the implications of their potential presence, in the interpretation of dark matter experiments.
A smooth inflaton potential is generally assumed when calculating the primordial power spectrum, implicitly assuming that a very small oscillation in the inflaton potential creates a negligible change in the predicted halo mass function. We show that this is not true. We find that a small oscillating perturbation in the inflaton potential in the slow-roll regime can alter significantly the predicted number of small halos. A class of models derived from supergravity theories gives rise to inflaton potentials with a large number of steps and many transplanckian effects may generate oscillations …
We discuss the sensitivity of the present and near-future axion dark matter experiments to a halo of axions or axion-like particles gravitationally bound to the Earth or the Sun. The existence of such halos, assuming they are formed, renders a significant gain in the sensitivity of axion searches while satisfying all the present experimental bounds. The structure and coherence properties of these halos also imply novel signals, which can depend on the latitude or orientation of the detector. We demonstrate this by analysing the sensitivity of several distinct types of axion dark matter experim…
We explore the weak lensing effect by line-of-sight halos and sub-halos with a mass of M < 10^7 solar mass in QSO-galaxy strong lens systems with quadruple images in a concordant LCDM universe. Using a polynomially fitted non-linear power spectrum P(k) obtained from N-body simulations that can resolve halos with a mass of M ~ 10^5 solar mass, or structures with a comoving wavenumber of k ~ 3*10^2 h/Mpc, we find that the ratio of magnification perturbation due to intervening halos to that of a primary lens is typically ~10 per cent and the predicted values agree well with the estimated values f…
We study the effect of baryons on the abundance of structures and substructures in a Lambda-CDM cosmology, using a pair of high resolution cosmological simulations from the GIMIC project. Both simulations use identical initial conditions, but while one contains only dark matter, the other also includes baryons. We find that gas pressure, reionisation, supernova feedback, stripping, and truncated accretion systematically reduce the total mass and the abundance of structures below ~10^12 solar masses compared to the pure dark matter simulation. Taking this into account and adopting an appropriat…
Strong lensing provides a powerful means of investigating the nature of dark matter as it probes dark matter structure on sub-galactic scales. We present an extension of a forward modeling framework that uses flux ratios from quadruply imaged quasars (quads) to measure the shape and amplitude of the halo mass function, including line of sight (LOS) halos and main deflector subhalos. We apply this machinery to 50 mock lenses --- roughly the number of known quads --- with warm dark matter (WDM) mass functions exhibiting free-streaming cutoffs parameterized by the half-mode mass $m_{\rm{hm}}$. As…
With SDSS galaxy data and halo data from up-to-date N-body simulations we construct a semi-empirical catalog (SEC) of early-type systems by making a self-consistent bivariate statistical match of stellar mass (M_star) and velocity dispersion (sigma) with halo virial mass (M_vir). We then assign stellar mass profile and velocity dispersion profile parameters to each system in the SEC using their observed correlations with M_star and sigma. Simultaneously, we solve for dark matter density profile of each halo using the spherical Jeans equation. The resulting dark matter density profiles deviate …
The extragalactic background light at far-infrared wavelengths originates from optically-faint, dusty, star-forming galaxies in the universe with star-formation rates at the level of a few hundred solar masses per year. Due to the relatively poor spatial resolution of far-infrared telescopes, the faint sub-millimetre galaxies are challenging to study individually. Instead, their average properties can be studied using statistics such as the angular power spectrum of the background intensity variations. A previous attempt at measuring this power spectrum resulted in the suggestion that the clus…
We use the secondary infall model described in Del Popolo (2009), which takes into account the effect of dynamical friction, ordered and random angular momentum, baryons adiabatic contraction and dark matter baryons interplay, to study how in- ner slopes of relaxed LCDM dark matter (DM) halos with and without baryons (baryons+DM, and pure DM) depend on redshift and on halo mass. We apply the quoted method to structures on galactic scales and clusters of galaxies scales. We find that the inner logarithmic density slope, of dark matter halos with baryons has a significant dependence on halo mass…
We examine the HI content and environment of all of the Local Group dwarf galaxies (M_tot < 10^10 M_solar), including the numerous newly discovered satellites of the Milky Way and M31. All of the new dwarfs, with the exception of Leo T, have no detected HI. The majority of dwarf galaxies within ~270 kpc of the Milky Way or Andromeda are undetected in HI (< 10^5 M_solar for Milky Way dwarfs), while those further than ~270 kpc are predominantly detected with masses ~10^5 to 10^8 M_solar. Analytical ram-pressure arguments combined with velocities obtained via proper motion studies allow for an es…
We study the effect of the supersonic baryon--CDM flow, which has recently been shown to have a large effect on structure formation during the dark ages 10 <~ z <~ 1000, on the abundance of luminous, low-mass satellite galaxies around galaxies like the Milky Way. As the supersonic baryon--CDM flow significantly suppresses both the number of halos formed and the amount of baryons accreted onto such halos of masses 10^6 < M_{halo} / M_solar < 10^8 at z >~ 10, a large effect results on the stellar luminosity function before reionization. As halos of these masses are believed to have very little s…
We present cosmological hydrodynamical simulations of the formation of dwarf galaxies in a representative sample of haloes extracted from the Millennium-II Simulation. Our six haloes have a z = 0 mass of ~10^10 solar masses and show different mass assembly histories which are reflected in different star formation histories. We find final stellar masses in the range 5 x 10^7 - 10^8 solar masses, consistent with other published simulations of galaxy formation in similar mass haloes. Our final objects have structures and stellar populations consistent with dwarf elliptical and dwarf irregular gal…
We argue that primordial dark matter halos could be generated during radiation domination by long range attractive forces stronger than gravity. In this paper we derive the conditions under which these structures could dominate the dark matter content of the Universe while passing microlensing constraints and cosmic microwave background energy injection bounds. The dark matter particles would be clumped in objects in the solar mass range with typical sizes of the order of the solar system. Consequences for direct dark matter searches are important.
NGC 891 is a nearby edge-on galaxy that is similar to the Milky Way and has a hot X-ray emitting halo that could arise from accretion, a galactic fountain, or a combination of the two. The metallicity of the gas can help distinguish between these models, and here we report on results that use 138 ks of archival Chandra data and 92 ks of new XMM-Newton data to measure the temperature and metallicity of the hot halo of the galaxy. We find good fits for a thermal model with kT ~ 0.2 keV and Z ~ 0.1 solar, and rule out solar metallicity to more than 99% confidence. This result suggests accretion f…
Since reionization prevents star formation in most halos below 3 x 10^9 solar masses, dwarf galaxies only populate a fraction of existing dark matter halos. We use hydrodynamic cosmological simulations of the Local Group to study the discriminating factors for galaxy formation in the early Universe and connect them to the present-day properties of galaxies and halos. A combination of selection effects related to reionization, and the subsequent evolution of halos in different environments, introduces strong biases between the population of halos that host dwarf galaxies, and the total halo pop…
Previously a theory has been presented which extends the geometrical structure of a real four-dimensional space-time via a field of orthonormal tetrads with an enlarged transformation group. This new transformation group, called the conservation group, contains the group of diffeomorphisms as a proper subgroup and we hypothesize that it is the foundational group for quantum geometry. The fundamental geometric object of the new geometry is the curvature vector, C^μ. Using the scalar Lagrangian density C^μC_μ\sqrt{-g}, field equations for the free field have been obtained which are invariant und…
The next generation of dark matter (DM) direct detection experiments and neutrino telescopes will probe large swaths of dark matter parameter space. In order to interpret the signals in these experiments, it is necessary to have good models of both the halo DM streaming through the solar system and the population of DM bound to the solar system. In this paper, the first in a series of three on DM in the solar system, we present simulations of orbits of DM bound to the solar system by solar capture in a toy solar system consisting of only the Sun and Jupiter, assuming that DM consists of a sing…
We investigate if there is a difference in the lithium abundances of stars belonging to two halo populations of F and G main-sequence stars previously found to differ in [alpha/Fe] for the metallicity range -1.4 < [Fe/H] < -0.7. Li abundances are derived from the LiI 6707.8 A line measured in high-resolution spectra using MARCS model atmospheres. Furthermore, masses of the stars are determined from the logTeff - logg diagram by interpolating between Yonsei-Yale evolutionary tracks. There is no significant systematic difference in the lithium abundances of high- and low-alpha halo stars. For th…
A galaxy halo may contain a large number of intermediate mass black holes (IMBHs) with masses in the range of 10^{2-6} solar mass. We propose to directly detect these IMBHs by observing multiply imaged QSO-galaxy or galaxy-galaxy strong lens systems in the submillimeter bands with high angular resolution. The silhouette of an IMBH in the lensing galaxy halo would appear as either a monopole-like or a dipole-like variation at the scale of the Einstein radius against the Einstein ring of the dust-emitting region surrounding the QSO. We use a particle tagging technique to dynamically populate a M…
(Abridged) This paper presents the first connections made between two local features in velocity-space found in a survey of M giant stars and stellar spatial inhomogeneities on global scales. Comparison to cosmological, chemodynamical stellar halo models confirm that the M giant population is particularly sensitive to rare, recent and massive accretion events. These events can give rise to local observed velocity sequences - a signature of a small fraction of debris from a common progenitor, passing at high velocity through the survey volume, near the pericenters of their eccentric orbits. The…
We study the properties of gas in and around 10^12 solar mass halos at z=2 using a suite of high-resolution cosmological hydrodynamic 'zoom' simulations. We quantify the thermal and dynamical structure of these gaseous reservoirs in terms of their mean radial distributions and angular variability along different sightlines. With each halo simulated at three levels of increasing resolution, the highest reaching a baryon mass resolution of ~10,000 solar masses, we study the interaction of filamentary inflow and the quasi-static hot halo atmosphere. We highlight the discrepancy between the spatia…
A number of recent challenges to the standard Lambda-CDM paradigm relate to discrepancies that arise in comparing the abundance and kinematics of local dwarf galaxies with the predictions of numerical simulations. Such arguments rely heavily on the assumption that the local dwarf and satellite galaxies form a representative distribution in terms of their stellar-to-halo mass ratios. To address this question, we present new, deep spectroscopy using DEIMOS on Keck for 82 low mass (10^7-10^9 solar masses) star-forming galaxies at intermediate redshift (z=0.2-1). For 50 percent of these we are abl…
Even though the dark-matter power spectrum in the absence of biasing predicts a number density of halos n(M) ~ M^-2 (i.e. a Schechter alpha value of -2) at the low-mass end (M < 10^10 M_solar), hydrodynamic simulations have typically produced values for stellar systems in good agreement with the observed value alpha ~ -1. We explain this with a simple physical argument and show that an efficient external gas-heating mechanism (such as the UV background included in all hydro codes) will produce a critical halo mass below which halos cannot retain their gas and form stars. We test this conclusio…
We examine the Velocity Distribution Function (VDF) in dark matter halos from Milky Way to cluster mass scales. We identify an empirical model for the VDF with a wider peak and a steeper tail than a Maxwell--Boltzmann distribution, and discuss physical explanations. We quantify sources of scatter in the VDF of cosmological halos and their implication for direct detection of dark matter. Given modern simulations and observations, we find that the most significant uncertainty in the VDF of the Milky Way arises from the unknown radial position of the solar system relative to the dark matter halo …
We investigate photon signatures of general decaying dark-matter particles in halos of primordial black holes. We derive the halo-profile density and the total decay rate for these combined dark-matter scenarios. For the case of axion-like particles of masses below $\mathcal{O}( 1 )\,$keV, we find strong bounds on the decay constant which are several orders of magnitude stronger than the strongest existing bounds, for all halo masses above $\mathcal{O}( 10^{-5} )$ solar masses. Using future X-ray measurements, it will be possible to push these bounds on such combined dark-matter scenarios even…