Shedding light on low-mass subhalo survival with numerical simulations

Abstract

In this work, we carry out a suite of specially-designed numerical simulations to shed further light on dark matter (DM) subhalo survival at mass scales relevant for gamma-ray DM searches, a topic subject to intense debate nowadays. Specifically, we have employed an improved version of DASH, a GPU N-body code, to study the evolution of low-mass subhalos inside a Milky Way-like halo with unprecedented accuracy. We have simulated subhalos with varying mass, concentration, and orbital properties, and considered the effect of the gravitational potential of the Milky-Way galaxy itself. In addition to shedding light on the survival of low-mass galactic subhalos, our results will provide detailed predictions that will aid current and future quests for the nature of dark matter.

News on Dark Matter from ICRC 2021

“…In fact, the hierarchical formation scenario of the cosmological structures, predicts that a population of dark subhalos should be present in DM halos like that one that hosts our galaxy. At ICRC 2021, the properties and relevance of these substructures for DM searches have been discussed in [4][5][6][7][8][9]. Ref.…”