ETHOS—an effective theory of structure formation: From dark particle physics to the matter distribution of the Universe
Name
PhysRevD.93.123527.pdf
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664.63 KB
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Author(s)
Cyr-Racine, Francis-Yan
Sigurdson, Kris
Zavala, Jesús
Bringmann, Torsten
Vogelsberger, Mark
Pfrommer, Christoph
Date Issued
June 2016
Journal
Physical Review D
Publisher
American Physical Society
Citation
Cyr-Racine, Francis-Yan et al. “ETHOS—an Effective Theory of Structure Formation: From Dark Particle Physics to the Matter Distribution of the Universe.” Physical Review D 93.12 (2016): n. pag. CrossRef. Web. 24 Mar. 2017. © 2016 American Physical Society
Version
Final published version
Abstract
We formulate an effective theory of structure formation (ETHOS) that enables cosmological structure formation to be computed in almost any microphysical model of dark matter physics. This framework maps the detailed microphysical theories of particle dark matter interactions into the physical effective parameters that shape the linear matter power spectrum and the self-interaction transfer cross section of nonrelativistic dark matter. These are the input to structure formation simulations, which follow the evolution of the cosmological and galactic dark matter distributions. Models with similar effective parameters in ETHOS but with different dark particle physics would nevertheless result in similar dark matter distributions. We present a general method to map an ultraviolet complete or effective field theory of low-energy dark matter physics into parameters that affect the linear matter power spectrum and carry out this mapping for several representative particle models. We further propose a simple but useful choice for characterizing the dark matter self-interaction transfer cross section that parametrizes self-scattering in structure formation simulations. Taken together, these effective parameters in ETHOS allow the classification of dark matter theories according to their structure formation properties rather than their intrinsic particle properties, paving the way for future simulations to span the space of viable dark matter physics relevant for structure formation.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.93.123527
