Scientific Seminars

The Warm Dark Matter Power Spectrum

Dida Markovic
ICG Portsmouth

2016-07-20    11:00    Merate - Library

Warm Dark Matter (WDM) is a generalisation of the standard Cold Dark Matter model in the sense that it does not assume dark matter particles to be absolutely cold. In the simplest models all dark matter is made of the same particles, which started out in thermal equilibrium and cooled to effectively become cold today. If such particles have masses of the order of a keV or less, they leave an observable imprint on the dark matter density field. At late times, the perturbations in the matter density field become non-linear. This means that they cannot be described perturbatively any longer. For this reason, N-body simulations are a good way to understand the formation of non-linear structure. Simulating WDM can be a challenge, because unlike CDM, it’s relatively large thermal velocities can introduce unwanted Poisson noise on small scales. With better computing resources nowadays it has become possible to examine WDM cosmologies with simulations. This talk will summarise some of the results of such simulations. It will outline some of the methods developed for calculating non-linear corrections to the matter power spectrum, which describes the matter density field today.