Low-mass halo perturbations in strong gravitational lenses at redshift z$\sim$0.5 are consistent with CDM

Abstract

We use a sample of 17 strong gravitational lens systems from the BELLS GALLERY survey to quantify the amount of low-mass dark matter haloes within the lensing galaxies and along their lines of sight, and to constrain the properties of dark matter. Based on a detection criterion of 10$σ$, we report no significant detection in any of the lenses. Using the sensitivity function at the 10-$σ$ level, we have calculated the predicted number of detectable cold dark matter (CDM) line-of-sight haloes to be $μ_{l} = 1.17\pm1.08$, in agreement with our null detection. Assuming a detection sensitivity that improved to the level implied by a 5-$σ$ threshold, the expected number of detectable line-of-sight haloes rises to $μ_l = 9.0\pm3.0$. Whilst the current data find zero detections at this sensitivity level (which has a probability of P$^{{\rm5}σ}_{\rm CDM}(n_{\rm det}=0)$=0.0001 and would be in strong tension with the CDM framework), we find that such a low detection threshold leads to many spurious detections and non-detections and therefore the current lack of detections is unreliable and requires data with improved sensitivity. Combining this sample with a subsample of 11 SLACS lenses, we constrain the half-mode mass to be $\log$(M$_{\rm hm}) < 12.26$ at the 2-$σ$ level. The latter is consistent with resonantly produced sterile neutrino masses m$_{\rm s} < 0.8$ keV at any value of the lepton asymmetry at the 2-$σ$ level.