Probing non-thermal light DM with structure formation and $N_\mathrm{eff}$

Abstract

In many models of dark matter (DM), several production mechanisms contribute to its final abundance, often leading to a non-thermal momentum distribution. This makes it more difficult to assess whether such a model is consistent with structure formation observations. We simulate the matter power spectrum for DM scenarios characterized by at least two temperatures and derive the suppression of structures at small scales and the expected number of Milky Way dwarf galaxies from it. This, together with the known bound on the number of relativistic particle species, N eff , allows us to obtain constraints on the parameter space of non-thermally produced DM. We propose a simple parametrization for non-thermal DM distributions and present a fitting procedure that can be used to adapt our results to other models.

Dark matter self-interactions in the matter power spectrum

“…Our results extend studies on Warm Dark Matter (WDM) widely studied in the literature. Non-interacting WDM can be produced from a thermal bath [15][16][17][18][19][20] or via out-of-equilibrium decays and non-thermal mechanisms [21][22][23][24] with a given phase space distribution. This can affect structure formation if DM particles are sufficiently light and fast.…”